After American operations of TikTok came under the management of Israeli billionaire Larry Ellison through a deal with Oracle, users began to leave the platform en masse.
Amid accusations of censorship regarding content related to Israel, there has been a rise in users switching to the alternative platform UpScrolled. This app, developed by Palestinian Issam Hijazi, is positioned as a social network free from censorship and influence from billionaires.
UpScrolled quickly gained attention, making it to the list of the 15 most downloaded apps in the U.S., and within just a few days, the number of downloads reached hundreds of thousands. It currently ranks 13th in the American Play Store.
It is worth mentioning that on September 10, 2025, Larry Ellison became the richest person in the world, surpassing Elon Musk. His fortune increased by more than $100 billion due to a sharp rise in Oracle's stock following a successful report, reaching $393 billion in just one day.
Larry Ellison was born in New York City to 19-year-old Jewish mother Florence Spellman. His father, a U.S. Air Force pilot of Italian descent, was transferred to a new duty station long before his mother learned of her pregnancy. When Larry fell ill with pneumonia at nine months old, his mother, realizing she could not provide adequate care, gave him up to be raised by relatives in Chicago. He was adopted by Lillian and Lewis Ellison when he was nine months old and did not know who his biological mother was until he turned 48.
Growing up in Chicago, Ellison attended local schools and enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. However, after the death of his adoptive mother, he did not pass his exams after his second year. A summer vacation with a friend, Chuck Weiss, in Northern California inspired him to return to Chicago, where he studied for a semester at the University of Chicago, where he was introduced to computing. In 1964, at the age of 20, he moved to Northern California.
Career
In the early 1970s, Ellison worked at Amdahl and Ampex. One of his projects at Ampex was the development of a database management system for the CIA, which he named "Oracle."
Edgar F. Codd's paper "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks," considered the first work on the relational data model, had a significant impact on Ellison. In 1977, along with two colleagues from Ampex, he founded Software Development Laboratories (SDL), which was renamed Relational Software Inc. in 1979 and then Oracle in 1982, in honor of the company's main product—Oracle Database. In trying to make the Oracle DBMS compatible with IBM System R, Ellison faced IBM's refusal to disclose source code, which prevented compatibility from being achieved. The first version released in 1979 was called Oracle v2, although for marketing reasons, the version number was not indicated.
In the 1980s, Oracle continued to release new versions of its DBMS. In 1986, the company's shares began trading on the stock exchange, and within three years, sales increased tenfold, reaching $584 million. However, in 1990, Oracle faced difficulties and reported losses, leading to the layoffs of hundreds of employees.
In September 2014, Ellison stepped down as CEO of Oracle, a position he held for nearly 38 years since the company's founding, but remained as chairman of the board and chief technology officer (CTO), continuing to oversee the development of the company's software and hardware.
