As the dust settles on the saga of TikTok’s fate in the US, one company has emerged as a clear winner: Software-maker Oracle has, with help from the federal government, wrested TikTok’s cloud storage contract away from Google, and emerged with a 12.5% stake in the world’s hottest social media app.
These developments are a major coup for Oracle chairman Larry Ellison, the world’s seventh richest person and one of the few prominent Silicon Valley leaders to publicly back US president Donald Trump. The deal offers a much-needed win for his company, which has struggled to make a dent in the cloud computing market while competing against heavyweights like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
Ellison made his fortune with Oracle, which began selling computer databases in the late 1970s. At the time, database services were a novel concept: As more and more of the economy moved online, Oracle became one of the world’s biggest data hosts, and snapped up a string of enterprise software firms along the way, including Sun Microsystems, which created the Java programming language.
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