American billionaire Larry Ellison pledges Tesla, SpaceX stock for son's $110bn Warner deal

American billionaire Larry Ellison put up shares in Tesla Inc., SpaceX and Paramount Skydance this year as collateral to borrow more money from banks, helping to fund his son David Ellison's $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery.

The pledges of SpaceX and Paramount Skydance stock were made for the first time in the days before the Warner Bros. deal closed on Oct. 6, according to filings that lenders made in California, where banks record their claims on pledged assets. Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. expanded their lending to Ellison in the same period. The filings do not show how much he borrowed.

Ellison, 82, co-founded Oracle Corp. in 1977 and is its executive chairman, chief technology officer and largest shareholder. He is worth about $170 billion, most of it in Oracle stock, and is among the 10 richest people in the world.

Borrowing instead of selling

Ellison had planned to raise cash for the Warner Bros. bid by selling Oracle stock. A filing in early September showed he had adopted a plan in June to sell up to 50 million Oracle shares, then worth about $7.5 billion. He dropped the plan within days of it becoming public, and no shares were sold under it.

He leaned on his bankers instead. Citigroup, HSBC Holdings Plc, JPMorgan, UBS Group AG and BNP Paribas SA now hold security interests in 87 million Oracle shares, up from about 30 million a year earlier, according to the California filings.

Those shares are part of a much larger pledge. Oracle disclosed in its proxy statement on Sept. 25 that Ellison had pledged about 413 million of his roughly 1.16 billion Oracle shares as collateral for loans, up from 346 million a year earlier. The pledged stock was worth about $57 billion at that day's closing price of $137.10. Oracle's governance committee says the shares secure personal term loans for ventures outside the company, that none are held in margin accounts and that Ellison can repay the loans without selling the pledged stock.

Borrowing against shares lets wealthy investors raise cash while keeping their stock, its voting rights and its future gains, and without paying the capital gains tax that a sale would trigger. The risk runs the other way when prices fall. Lenders can demand more collateral or cash, and Oracle shares have lost more than half their value since their peak in September 2025.

Tesla and SpaceX holdings

Ellison has been a Tesla investor for years. He disclosed in early 2019 that he owned 3 million Tesla shares worth more than $1 billion, a holding equal to 45 million shares after the electric-car maker's two later stock splits, and called the company his second-largest investment. He sat on Tesla's board from December 2018 to 2022.

His SpaceX stake traces back to the $1 billion he put into Elon Musk's 2022 takeover of Twitter. Twitter, renamed X, was folded into Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI, which SpaceX bought in February. Ellison held about 0.15% of SpaceX when it listed on the Nasdaq on June 12 at $135 a share, a stake worth about $2.7 billion at the offering valuation.

An expensive bet on Hollywood

The Warner Bros. acquisition, which combined Paramount Pictures, CBS and Paramount+ with Warner Bros., HBO, CNN and TNT, was funded with $47 billion of new equity sold at $12 a share and tens of billions of dollars in debt. The Ellison family put in about $17 billion for an estimated 1.4 billion shares. RedBird Capital Partners, run by Gerry Cardinale, invested about $4 billion, and three Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds contributed about $24 billion.

Larry Ellison also gave a personal guarantee covering more than $40 billion of the equity financing, first offered in December 2025 to back his son's bid.

The combined company, now called Skydance Corp. and run by David Ellison as chairman and chief executive officer, has had a rough start on the stock market. Its shares closed at $6.80 on Monday, 43% below the $12 the Ellisons paid. At that price, the family's newly bought shares are worth about $9.5 billion, roughly $7.5 billion less than they cost. Skydance carries pro forma net debt of about $78.9 billion.

The Ellisons and RedBird own all of Skydance's voting Class A stock, giving them control of the company. David Ellison and his father together hold about 47% of its shares and 77.5% of its voting power.