Liam Denning, Columnist

Larry Ellison, Tesla and the Rocket-Drone Defense

Elon Musk’s new overseer has some funny ideas about oversight.

January 2, 2019 at 2:09 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

Larry Ellison, Tesla’s new board member.
Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images North America

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Larry Ellison, chairman and co-founder of Oracle Corp., begins 2019 with a new and tricky job: overseeing Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Corp. It’s tricky because Ellison says he and Musk are friends, and you know how awkward it can get if you’re matey with someone at work and then maybe something bad happens and you have to tell your buddy (and fellow board member) they screwed up.

It’s even more awkward in Ellison’s case because, judging from a riff he went on about Tesla a few months ago, it isn’t clear that even he is fully qualified to critique Musk.