Stop Worrying – Larry Ellison And Prez Trump Will Have This Whole Coronavirus Thing Licked Shortly With The Power Of Data

Comment Larry Ellison is not one to let anything get him down, least of all gravity. Grave though the global COVID-19 pandemic may be, the Oracle founder, CTO and chairman is a man who produces. And, as intrepid Forbes reporter Angel Au-Yeung found out, the product is "wellness".

Last week's Forbes front cover is graced with the faces of five billionaire business leaders whose world-beating humility humbles them into leading the march of progress: "Agents of Change," it calls them.

Digging into the secrets of Ellison's success, Au-Yeung took a trip to Ellison's private $300m Hawaiian island to make a startling discovering. It's data. Not software licences, a ravenous sales team or proprietary software, but data.

It has to be because data brings us to the crux of the story. Through data, Ellison has partnered with US President Donald Trump and plans to rescue America from the wreckage of the COVID-19 outbreak.

We're told that as the disease caused by the novel coronavirus spread to the United States, Ellison generously put his plans for a "data-driven health utopia" on hold.

We then pick up the story with David Agus, a cancer doctor and co-founder of Ellison's wellness project Sensei.

Ellison's obsession with health data brought about his acquisition of his Hawaiian island, Lanai, on which he has spent least half a billion dollars turning it into a "laboratory for health and wellness powered by data".

Health data is also at the heart of a Sensei.

But that is not where his ambition ends. The Lanai lab will provide lessons for the world to follow.

Yes, but go on...

An enquiring mind might discover that Australia already grows 15 per cent of its tomato crop in an arid region using seawater greenhouses and solar power. But Forbes is in full flow by then.

Oh, yes. We couldn't get through the story without dropping a name or three. Alongside Trump, Musk pops up to say Ellison is "really one of the best engineers I've met," which might say as much about the quality of engineers known to Musk as it does Ellison's mind.

Also on the cast list is, inevitably, Steve Jobs, Ellison's friend whose cancer treatment provided the link to doctor-cum-business partner David Agus.

On the subject of truth, wouldn't Trump's tenuous relationship with it trouble Ellison, a man with a conscience as clean as his shirts, Forbes' scribe does get around to wondering.

After all, Trump "has in recent weeks defaulted to the position of quack-in-chief, touting unproven or half-baked solutions to the public. The fear: that Trump might use certain information to circumvent randomized clinical trials," she writes.

Don't worry, kids. Those fears? They are about to be allayed.

Epidemiologists the world over suddenly awaken in an epiphany: "If only we'd thought of things, and evidence of them," they cry.

And Ellison has assured us he has employed a sound rule of thumb when judging whether to associate himself with the four-bankruptcies-property-mogul-turned-TV-personality-turned-president.

If "not thinking someone is the devil" is the bar set for a trusted relationship with Ellison, we can all be assured he has not acquired a penny of his $59bn fortune by untoward means. And after all, he has a higher calling: health data.

... he doesn't think Trump is the devil. That's the thing about data. It possesses a surprising ability to prove you wrong. ®

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