People

Oracle employees log off to protest Ellison’s Trump fundraiser

Business experts say Ellison's actions are business as usual, but some employees see it differently.

Oracle chair Larry Ellison

Larry Ellison's decision to host a fundraiser for Donald Trump prompted a protest by Oracle staffers Thursday.

Photo: Getty Images North America

When about 300 Oracle employees staged a virtual walkout on Thursday, they were protesting Chairman Larry Ellison's decision to host a fundraiser for President Trump this week, according to an organizer. Many expressed dismay. Why would Ellison support Trump so publicly? The financial support "damages our company," employees wrote in a petition that now has more than 8,300 signatures. But experts say that Ellison's support of the president is most likely all about protecting Oracle's business interests.

Companies as big as Oracle need to stay in the government's good graces. "When you get any industry that gets big enough, whether it's oil and the railroads, or automakers, or tech, they have different relationships with lawmakers," said Margaret O'Mara, a history professor at the University of Washington who researches Silicon Valley. She said as tech has become increasingly dominant, leaders like Ellison may feel the need to engage with the administration even in the face of employee opposition.

Get what matters in tech, in your inbox every morning. Sign up for Source Code.

But Oracle may need the administration even more than other companies, at least right now.

The company is locked in a high-profile suit against Google. On Wednesday, the Trump administration submitted an amicus brief taking Oracle's side in the long-running copyright fight between Google and Oracle, which is going to be heard by the Supreme Court next month. There seems to be "crony capitalism going on with the Google-Oracle case. It does smell bad," said Jeff Cowie, a fellow at Stanford and a Vanderbilt University history professor who has written books on labor and politics.

This administration has been good to big business in general, notes Rebecca Eisler, assistant professor of political science at San Francisco State University. "The administration's position toward business and industry, broadly speaking, has been in support of deregulation, tax incentives and subsidies," she said.

Ellison, who co-founded the Redwood Shores-based database company and is No. 7 on the Forbes list of the richest people in the world, called himself a lifelong Democrat and a Bill Clinton fan in a Playboy interview in 2002. But since then he has supported politicians on both sides of the aisle: He donated to a political action committee for Republican Mitt Romney when he ran for president; hosted President Barack Obama on a weekend golfing trip; and hosted fundraisers for Republican Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky.

"I remember many years ago when he was talking to engineering, he said he was a Democrat," said Pearl Ong, a software engineer who has worked at Oracle for more than 20 years. "Then I saw a couple years ago he was supporting Marco Rubio. But to have a fundraiser for Dumpster? I can't believe it."

Ong — who speculated that Ellison may be holding out hope that Oracle still has a chance to win the JEDI cloud-computing contract from the Pentagon — is one of the thousands of employees who has signed the petition, which called on the company leadership to urge Ellison to cancel the fundraiser.

"Every year Oracle employees must take ethics, harassment and diversity training reflecting Oracle's stated values of responsible business practice and treating everyone fairly and with respect," wrote Joe McClintock, another software engineer, in the petition. "Larry Ellison is the face of Oracle and as such he is supporting a person who is the antithesis of these values? This is so, so wrong."

Another employee, Steven Feuerstein, tweeted: "For me, opposition to Trump is no longer a matter of political viewpoint, of disagreeing with his mostly awful policies. It is a matter of whether you believe in the rule of law."

One of the organizers of Thursday's worker action — which asked employees to log off and spend the rest of the day contributing to causes such as immigration, gender equity or the environment — said the company also forbids making political donations on behalf of Oracle.

While Ellison may have been acting as a private citizen, it's hard to see him as such, said the organizer, an Oracle employee based in New York. "It's really hard not to see Larry Ellison as chairman, not to mention his symbolic meaning to the company," she said.

Several Oracle employees told Protocol the company has not addressed the worker actions at all. No emails or announcements. But the organizer said a handful of others were unable to access the worker-action website from their work laptops Thursday, getting the following error message when they tried: "Access to this site may not be permitted by the Oracle Acceptable Use Policy."

"The site was not intentionally blocked by Oracle," said company spokesperson Deborah Hellinger. "It was temporarily blocked by a 'false positive' from our McAfee network security and antivirus software."

The organizer also said her manager had told her that Ellison "is asking our bosses about us." She said that some employees partaking in Thursday's action fear the company could retaliate.

An Oracle spokesperson said the company would have no comment on the worker action.

Despite the fact that "everything has become political" in Silicon Valley, as O'Mara puts it, the Oracle employees' actions were relatively small compared with other higher-profile walkouts at companies like Google. And the Oracle action was not universally supported within the company. "If Larry wants to support Trump as a citizen of this nation, he has that right, and I support it (may not agree with it but that is not the point)," said Todd Fitzwater, a VP at Oracle Netsuite. Other employees expressed similar sentiments in the comments section of the petition.

But as recent employee activism in the valley has shown, if the Oracle protests continue or grow it could become a bigger problem for the company. "Silicon Valley has always been about the people, we shouldn't underestimate that," O'Mara said.

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins