Larry Ellison’s $40 billion pledge to son’s Paramount deal shows a shift in billionaire giving
Larry Ellison, the 81-year-old Oracle co-founder and longtime mogul of tech and sport, recently sent ripples through the business and philanthropic worlds by revealing plans to devote $40 billion of his own fortune to the Paramount–Skydance merger — a deal that redefines not only Hollywood’s future but Ellison’s own legacy.
Ellison’s $40 billion promise to personally back his son’s Paramount deal is not a charitable donation in the classic sense. It is something more emblematic of this billionaire era: philanthropic capitalism, where vast personal fortunes are deployed through markets rather than around them, and “giving it away” increasingly means reshaping industries instead of writing checks to traditional charities.
It lands at the exact moment that the older model of billionaire philanthropy—epitomized by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates—is visibly winding down, creating a stark contrast between giving that flows through foundations and giving that rides on deal sheets.
Ellison’s move is as audacious as it is intimate. His son, David Ellison, runs Skydance, the upstart studio that has been circling Paramount and now aims to fuse old‑line Hollywood assets with a tech‑forward, streaming‑native strategy. Ellison’s commitment, structured as a personal guarantee of more than $40 billion in equity and debt support for Paramount’s bid, effectively turns a hostile takeover into a family‑backed capital project. It is a father’s show of confidence, but it is also a data‑era mogul’s attempt to wire his worldview into the next generation of media infrastructure.
This would be notable even if Ellison had never uttered a word about philanthropy. But the Oracle cofounder has publicly pledged to give away at least 95% of his fortune over time, joining the cohort of mega‑donors who say they do not intend to die with most of their wealth. In that context, the Paramount guarantee looks less like a side bet and more like a preview of how he intends to fulfill that promise: not primarily through anonymous grants to charities, but by moving enormous sums into entities he believes can “fix” big systems—medicine, software, and now entertainment.
Growing divide in billionaire giving
That philosophy distinguishes Ellison from someone like MacKenzie Scott, who has become the avatar of a more traditional, community‑centered model of billionaire giving. Scott has directed tens of billions of dollars in largely unrestricted donations to thousands of nonprofits, with a deliberate emphasis on organizations serving marginalized communities—ranging from housing and food security groups to HBCUs and grassroots racial‑justice networks. Her theory of change is straightforward: transfer resources quickly to on‑the‑ground organizations, trust local leaders to allocate them, and avoid the overhead and power concentration of a large foundation.
Ellison, by contrast, has long preferred to seed institutions that look more like extensions of his professional life. His largest publicized gifts have gone into cutting‑edge medical research and institutions that blend science and technology, such as cancer and AI‑driven medicine initiatives. The Paramount commitment extends that pattern into culture. Rather than funding media literacy programs or journalism nonprofits, Ellison is putting his thumb on the scale of who owns the pipes themselves: the studios, libraries, and platforms that produce and distribute stories worldwide.
He is not alone in this shift. Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is following a similar arc. After an early phase that encompassed education reform and policy‑adjacent work, CZI has doubled down on scientific research, AI‑enabled biology, and large‑scale research infrastructure. Structurally, it operates less like a traditional foundation and more like a hybrid of investment fund and lab network, with a focus on building tools and platforms that other scientists and institutions will use. When these donors talk about “impact,” they are usually referring to rewiring how core systems operate, not simply amplifying the budgets of organizations operating within those systems.
Call it the billionaire bifurcation. On one side are philanthropists like Scott, whose giving resembles turbocharged versions of 20th‑century philanthropy: extensive checks to nonprofits, universities, and community groups, often with fewer strings attached and more attention to equity. On the other hand, are Ellison and Zuckerberg, who are pioneering a model in which philanthropy is almost indistinguishable from industrial strategy. The money may technically sit in philanthropic vehicles. Still, it flows into companies, labs, and platforms that donors help control, and that operate squarely inside the markets where their fortunes were made.
The limitations of traditional philanthropy
That raises uncomfortable questions about power and accountability. When $40 billion is pledged to underpin a media merger, framed in part as a long‑term contribution to cultural and technological progress, who gets to decide what counts as a public benefit? Shareholders will certainly have a say. Regulators may weigh in. But unlike a conventional grant to a food bank or a legal‑aid nonprofit, the social returns of a fortified Hollywood empire are diffuse, contested, and mediated through subscription prices, content strategies, and labor negotiations.
Yet philanthropic capitalism also speaks to a real anxiety among today’s richest founders: the sense that traditional philanthropy is too incremental for problems they perceive as structural and technological. For Ellison, building a stronger, AI‑savvy studio system may feel more consequential than funding a scattershot portfolio of media nonprofits. If you believe the future is written in code and distributed through a handful of global platforms, owning a bigger piece of that machinery can look like the most responsible way to spend a fortune you’ve vowed to surrender.
Ellison’s $40 billion bet on Paramount and his son’s vision may ultimately be judged as a savvy business maneuver, a risky act of paternal devotion, or a bold experiment in legacy‑building. But in the emerging playbook of billionaire giving, it already has a clear place. This is what it looks like when “giving it away” means never really letting it leave the ecosystem that created it—when philanthropy moves off the foundation ledger and onto the deal sheet, and capitalism itself becomes the main instrument of charity.
For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
