Barely three years after Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison made a big stink about leaving the Bay Area for Austin, he’s planning to move the company headquarters again, this time to Nashville, Tennessee.
Extremely divorced billionaire and yacht enthusiast Larry Ellison is largely someone else’s problem these days. While Ellison still owns countless California homes, he mainly resides on a Hawaiian island that he bought up 97% of. And the database company Oracle that he co-founded made a big deal of relocating its headquarters from Redwood City to Austin, Texas in late 2020, during the height of the tech exodus.
Oracle has unveiled plans to move its headquarters again, this time to Nashville, Tenn., to be closer to companies in the healthcare industry https://t.co/FDvr62mGD5 https://t.co/FDvr62mGD5
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) April 24, 2024
That didn’t last long! The Wall Street Journal reports that Oracle is now planning to move its world headquarters to Nashville, Tennessee, as Ellison disclosed at a Tuesday conference session. The move comes as Oracle pivots its focus into the healthcare industry and medical records.
Bloomberg reports that Ellison said the new (and still unbuilt) Nashville campus willl “ultimately be our world headquarters." Though he quickly seemed to regret the remark and said, "I shouldn’t have said that," perhaps worried that he might jeopardize some government incentives he got to move to Texas.
The Nashville campus has not even started construction, and won’t fully open until 2030. It’s being designed by Norman Foster, who did Apple's spaceship donut campus in Cupertino.
"There will be a concert venue, a lake with a floating stage where we can have concerts for the community,” Ellison said Tuesday. “We want to be part of the community. Our people love it here and we think it’s the center of our future."
You might think that Oracle’s only remaining footprint in the Bay Area is their name on the Giants' ballpark. But there’s more to it. Yes, years ago their annual Oracle World conference would gum up the works in SoMa, before that conference bolted for Las Vegas. And certainly no one misses that billionaire boat race America’s Cup that Ellison brought here in 2013.
But Oracle still has some 12,000 Bay Area employees, or at least did as recently as 2022, according to SFGate. That far outnumbers the reported 2,500 employees at its Austin headquarters, though the Bay Area employees are spread out across the Peninsula, SF, and the East Bay.
Related: Oracle Employees Circulate Petition Over Larry Ellison's Planned Golf Fundraiser for Trump [SFist]
Image: SAN FRANCISCO, CA - OCTOBER 22: Oracle co-founder and Chairman Larry Ellison delivers a keynote address during the Oracle OpenWorld on October 22, 2018 in San Francisco, California. The Oracle co-founder and Chairman kicked off the annual Oracle OpenWorld conference that runs through October 25th. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
