After committing $115 million to Harvard, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison doesn't appear to be following through. Like Jonah Goldberg on prom night, Harvard is anxiously sitting by the phone, crying a permanent stain all over a ruffled baby-blue rayon tux.
Ellison's proposed donation for the Ellison Institute for World Health should have kicked in about 10 months ago. In the competitive nature of rich techies, Bill Gates has set a high bar in his charitable contributions.
And Larry's a competitive guy, no doubt about it. The Oracle CEO has already won a fleeting victory in the race of high-tech billionaires to build the most ostentatious yacht. At $200 million, Ellison's yacht may not cure cancer, but it pisses off Paul Allen and is one sweet ride.
In the middle of that tech stock meltdown in 2000 Ellison briefly surpassed Bill Gates in net worth and became the world's richest man. And like Gates, Ellison didn't acquire that wealth without taking more than a few short cuts and a generous dose of ruthlessness. Beyond his hostile nature, Ellison's actual executive skills have been questioned by many.
As an Ayn Rand devotee, he is prone to justifying his lack of philanthropic activity as a moral statement:
... it is not very popular to think that commerce is more
important than politics, but it is. It is not very popular to think
that Ford Motor Company did more to help humanity than the Ford
Foundation ever did, but it did.
A few years back, when Time Magazine devoted an issue to celebrating the philanthropy of the super rich, they didn't miss an opportunity to idolize even those billionaires who hadn't actually bothered to philanthropize. Larry Ellison's little blurb, in a parade of do-gooders who actually bother to write checks and set up foundations, was this Orwellian title: He Gives Best by Investing. Ellison repeated his little Ford Foundation v. Ford Motor Company chestnut to earn a hallowed seat amongst the charitable elite by simply equating business with benevolence. Indeed, that title, and that entire issue, told you all you ever needed to know about Time Magazine's class interests.
Much like his buddy Steve Jobs (the enlightened megalomaniac), Ellison's social leanings are not especially conservative:
I am a Democrat.... There are no Republicans in California; they're just middle-of-the-road
Democrats.
He was even rumored to play a role in fund raising for Bill Clinton's Presidential Library--though one can be assured that whatever Ellison's own contribution, it must surely be linked to the Clinton Justice Department's dogged pursuit of Oracle's arch-enemy Microsoft.
Again, seeing how Larry has never been especially charitable, why did he propose the donation in the first place? The Financial Times hints at his real motives:
...after exchanging draft contracts, drafting a press release and
saying the money would arrive in days, Mr Ellison's advisers last
autumn began linking payment to final settlement of an insider trading
suit brought by Oracle shareholders, which was to include a substantial
donation to charity.
So it looks like Ellison may have simply set up his "donation" to negotiate his way out of a lawsuit. And for a multi-billionaire looking for tax deductible write-offs, it's a hell of a double-play. This kind of thinking reminds us of what separates the Prime Movers (in Randspeak) from the rabble.
Harvard's problem could now be that, given the way Ellison spends, he may not actually have the money to give Harvard. But that's always been the Ellison/Oracle way, big on promise slow on delivery: like the first release of highly problematic Oracle software, which was designed to lock in customers rather than serve them. Salesmanship over quality product every time.
There is an unusual amount of focus in the philanthropy of tech gurus towards "health" issues. Now, health issues should be a predominant focus of anyone focused on the betterment of mankind. However, to let our reasonable and cynical instincts run wild for a moment, as Silicon Valley legend and founder of both SGI and Netscape Jim Clark realized a few years back, the "health" industry is potentially the biggest financial jackpot of all. Health care is the one industry that every human on the planet is likely to engage many times in their lives, and at no small expense. Let's see, that's about 7 billion people multiplied by the costs of health care in a lifetime... well, that's about just enough money to satisfy a tech billionaire.
Also, health issues are a sneaky way of foisting intellectual property enforcement on underdeveloped countries with little need for copyright protection but an enormous need of medicine. Every sizable donation of medical supplies and technology by a major industrialized country is explicitly tied to protecting pharmaceutical copyrights. Until a country has developed an infrastructure to protect copyrights they are not a desirable market for the software and high tech industry. Therefore, devotion to "health" issues could be less about sick people than it is about opening tech markets.
Of course, the religion of capitalism will tell us therein lies the beauty of capitalism: underdeveloped countries will ultimately benefit from the cynical motives of capitalists. So, why then do we call it "philanthropy"? And better still, why must their capital investment in the form of non-profit institutions be reimbursed by the rest of us in the form of tax deductions? That's right, because it's not really capitalism after all.
Larry Ellison seems to exist to make Bill Gates look appealing. Hey, it's working.
