8 ms·
I need the simple English version on what exactly this lawsuit is about.
by data4lyfe 7y ago
I need the simple English version on what exactly this lawsuit is about.
- bob1029 7y agoLarry Ellison owned 40% of NetSuite when it was purchased at a very high price. He effectively ran both sides of the deal (between oracle and NetSuite) and funneled shareholder money into his own pockets via the transaction. Allegedly.
- lonelappde 7y agoSold for $10B (3 years ago). 40% of that is $4B, of Ellison's $65B financial networth. The amount Ellison profited from scheming (the premium over actual value, discounted by the fact that Ellison owns much of money being spent on the purchase) seems...not big enough to matter? But his greed is unbridled?
- rosybox 7y agoI don't really understand when you already have billions of dollars why having more billions of dollars even matters anymore. How is more billions going to change your standard of living? You can buy two islands instead of just one? When you have so much money, how is getting more money a motivation?
- wstrange 7y agoBeing richer than Bezos or Buffet
- jjeaff 7y agoHe must realize that ain't happening. He's squeezing the last bit out of Oracle before it gets crushed by it's incumbents.
- felipemnoa 7y agoIt is about winning. The money is just a way of keeping score.
- dredmorbius 7y agoWealth at that level isn't cardinal, it's ordinal. "Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power." -- Adam Smith
- andrewflnr 7y agoAt that point, as far as I can tell, it's just about getting a higher score. It might feel like something more meaningful, even meaningfully greedy or power-hungry, but I think that underneath all the rationalizations it's just the thrill of making that number get bigger.
- twblalock 7y agoPeople with that attitude would never bust their butts to get billions in the first place. Most of the people who have earned that kind of money are not the kind of people who would stop trying to earn even more.
- chasontherobot 7y agoIts true, addiction is a troubling disease
- aasasd 7y agoOne curious motivation for amassing money is that your offsprings can spend it. E.g. Megan Ellison, owner and CEO of Annapurna Pictures, a film producer and executive producer (aka a moneybag) on 35 titles since 2010, including for major directors like Coens, Linklater, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wong Kar-wai, Spike Jonze. Also Annapurna Interactive's game Gorogoa looks pretty interesting, at least visually—haven't tried it yet.
- codazoda 7y agoWut?
- jjeaff 7y agoLarry Ellison's daughter is a big spender.
- abvr 7y agoWow, didn't know that. And gotta agree, at least they've got some great films on that list.
- aasasd 7y agoI've gotten curious about the company when started seeing the same logo in films of Coens, Linklater and Jonze. The memorable name also helps.
- MadWombat 7y agoI played the game. It is very good. A bit short, but good.
- cosmodisk 7y agoThis is what a lot of people misunderstand. Very few,if any at all, people past $1B mark care about money per se. By then they would have bought the houses,the women/men, the cars,boats and whatever else they want. So all those,kind of targets, are gone.The only reason they keep doing it is because money making ( or whatever brings that money) drives them.
- qaq 7y ago"whatever else they want" well unless they want to collect art :) you could blow 1B on a few paintings
- hkmurakami 7y agoOr islands. Which he has purchased.
- masonic 7y agoOr Sports franchises. He cheaped out on buying the Warriors by, what, $10 million? The franchise has appreciated since by, what, $2 billion?
- johannes1234321 7y agoOr the competition on the Forbes list of the richest people.
- danans 7y ago> When you have so much money, how is getting more money a motivation? Power over even more other people, for better or for worse.
- PopeDotNinja 7y agoThe drive many have to acquire billions in assets doesn't go away after they acquire billions of dollars.
- hannasanarion 7y agoLarry Ellison is a particularly greedy bastard. You could make a James Bond movie with him as the villain and nobody would notice. He owns an island in Hawaii where the locals work for him as de facto serfs. He has donated to two charities in his life: one to Stanford in exchange for not admitting fault in an options backdating scandal, and one to set up a charitable foundation to research ways to extend his own life. The mission statements and internal marching orders at Oracle and his various other companies is "make lots of money for Larry". Nothing else matters, they will screw the users, screw the customers, screw the product, screw the employees, screw the open source community, screw the legal system, as long as there's revenue for Larry, the bosses are happy bacause that's all that the company exists for.
- tjpnz 7y agoFor a second I thought you were describing Gavin Belson from Silicon Valley - turns out the character is based on Ellison.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- throwaway2048 7y agoThe movie version of Tony stark/Iron Man is pretty much explicitly based on Larry Ellison because they wanted to make a super hero out of one of the least likeable people possible.
- bscphil 7y agoOr, as the classic Bryan Cantrill line goes, "Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc
- goatinaboat 7y agoHence the saying One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison
- a_imho 7y agoWhat else should for profit companies exist for?
- dagw 7y agoWhen you have so much money, how is getting more money a motivation? Because the more you have the higher up the scoreboard you move. If you're the 17th richest person in the world, moving into the top 10 is probably a massive motivator, and once you're the 7th richest I bet you lie awake at night scheming how to get into the top 5.
- MadWombat 7y agoBecause being motivated to make money is what made you rich in the first place? I write code for a living. If tomorrow I wake up independently wealthy, I might quit my job, but I will not stop writing code.
- vkou 7y agoYou don't get to be Larry Ellison with $65B to your name by leaving money on the table. There's a survivorship bias at play, here. People who don't have those kinds of priorities tend to not become stupid rich.
- jchw 7y agoSpeaking purely in terms of money, I think $4B is still a lot to someone who has a net worth of $65B. The litmus test for me is whether you’d notice if you lost that much. I think you would. Was it worth it? Maybe not. Still, it’s a substantial amount.
- johannes1234321 7y agoHow would you notice? There's nothing you can buy with 65B you can't by with 60B or even 50B. Only the distance to Buffet and others is different.
- ineedasername 7y agoThere's no much difference in lifestyle between making $100,000 a year and $110,000, but I'd sure know the difference if I lost $10,000. Either way though, at that level it's not really about the money itself.
- jchw 7y agoYou would notice by looking at your account balance. When I worked as a part time cashier in the midwest, I could notice $5 missing from my account. In fact I did notice an errant $7 charge. I didn’t have to be particularly vigilant, just, there wasn’t that much money flowing through my account. As an engineer in the Bay Area, I could miss a $100 transaction. Not saying I would necessarily, but looking at month to month finances, nothing would really look too out of the ordinary. It could fade into the noise. Of course this has mostly to do with the amount of money flowing through accounts, but I am pretty sure that if 4 billion dollars disappeared, it would be promptly noticed. That’s still a huge net change, even if month to month finances scaled up linearly with account balance - and I don’t think they do.
- johannes1234321 7y agoWell that doesn't match how wealth on the level we are talking about works. I guess that lots of Larry Ellison's wealth is in stocks, which are fluctuating in worth on a constant basis. Another part of his wealth is real estate, like his Hawaiian island or land for his Japanase-style home in the Bay Area. There the value is only an estimate. Also I assume most of the day to day handling is in the hands of an accountant and there's constant in and out of sums for paying his personal staff, buying supplies, paying maintenence of his Mig Jet or whatever goes on there.
- mhfs 7y agoLook from the other side as well. I doubt such transaction moves the needle enough in Oracle’s performance to mean anything to the pension fund’s investment. However, it’s almost an asset for the fund to be able to pursuit such lawsuit.
- joering2 7y agoWell it won’t be Ellison looking into dollar value but judge and lawyers. Besides this whole scheme could be filed under insider trading in some form. And Martha Steward went to jail for much smaller schennegans. Ellison could be in much more trouble than just hasing out a $ penalty and settling a lawsuit.
- abvr 7y ago> Besides this whole scheme could be filed under insider trading in some form. Huh, how ironic would that be, as the company's primary compliance policies urge it's employees against insider trading and other such practices and warns them multiple times not only when they're inducted into it but several times throughout their employment.
- mark-r 7y agoWas that paid in cash or stock? If Ellison ended up with more voting shares it might have been about more than the money.
- ksherlock 7y agoWhen Martha Stewart went to Jail over $45,673.
- wp381640 7y agoLarry sunk a bunch of money and pride into Netsuite because he hated Marc and Salesforce so much after being booted from that company. He was bailing himself out financially, in ego and also catching Oracle up in the entire cloud shift they missed and failed on with their own early shitty online products
- kjs3 7y agoFraud is relative? If I only steal below a certain ratio, I'm good? If I only fuck you below a certain percentage, I should walk?
- stevespang 7y agoYes, and if you do that as a real estate agent you may loose your license and you become fair game in a court of law.
- johnvanommen 7y ago> Larry Ellison owned 40% of NetSuite when it was purchased at a very high price. He effectively ran both sides of the deal (between oracle and NetSuite) and funneled shareholder money into his own pockets via the transaction. Allegedly. It's very similar to what happened with HP and Autonomy.
- mark_l_watson 7y agoI didn’t know that. More details please. I briefly used Autonomy software almost twenty years ago so I followed the big bucks acquisition with some interest.
- yellowapple 7y agoBasically: Larry Ellison had a vested interest in Oracle buying NetSuite, and (allegedly) abused his power within Oracle to kickoff the NetSuite acquisition at a premium far above NetSuite's actual value, thus (allegedly) financially benefiting Ellison rather nicely.
- robdachshund 7y agoDick move but is that illegal?