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Comment by sonofhans | Hacker News Reader

> “The report, which IGN can confirm based on conversations with our own sources, states that Annapurna Interactive president Nathan Gary had recently been in negotiations with Annapurna founder and billionaire Megan Ellison to spin the gaming segment off as its own company. However, Ellison eventually pulled out of negotiations, at which point Gary resigned. Almost 30 other individuals, including division co-heads Deborah Mars and Nathan Vella, as well as the entire remaining staff of Annapurna Interactive, joined him.”

From IGN — https://www.ign.com/articles/annapurnas-entire-gaming-team-h...

I don’t blame them. I’d rather negotiate my arm out of a shark’s mouth than the cost of a hot dog with Larry Ellison, or his daughter. You don’t get that awful rich by ever believing you’re awful rich enough.

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This is what people with talents should do if they don't agree with the super riches who don't do anything substantial but inherit a shit ton of money.

Imagine having to negotiate with Larry Ellisons nepo daughter, how can you even keep a straight face. "It says here you are a film producer?"

I only found out recently that animated film company Laika was created after Nike founder Phil Knight bought his son a new career after he failed at being a rapper.

He bought into Will Vinton studios and then forced Oscar winning animation pioneer Will Vinton out of his own company.

There's a whole documentary, sad and interesting.

If I recall, it turns out that his "failed rapper" son had some sort of natural talent for this and has got nothing but accolades even from other animators ever since. Although I do get your point.

Yes, they did produce this great movie https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubo_and_the_Two_Strings

f me that movie was so great, only to be overshadowed by Coco a year later.

He also directed Bumblebee, perhaps the only great film in the Transformers universe.

I don't follow? Why is that funny? Why wouldn't she be able to be a film producer?

On average, those who enter a field using money are less accomplished than those who enter a field using experience. Obviously.

I think it has to do more with being honest about ones core competencies.

There are tons of people who enter a field because they're rich, hire great people, connect those great people with money, and do very well.

There are also rich people who believe wealth qualifies them as subject matter experts, which tends to go less well...

Isaacman seems to have his shit together.

Also a nice guy. Perhaps not unrelated.

Branson is supposed to be a really decent chap.

I suspect a lot of it has to do with who you surround yourself with, and how much agency you give them.

One word that rich people almost never hear, is “no.” Even really nice ones don't hear it often.

That means that almost any rectally-sourced, harebrained idea they squeeze out, is treated as genius, by their entourage.

I know a number of fairly wealthy people, and some of them won’t have anything to do with me, because I say the “N” word. Others, actually ask me what I think.

People rapidly learn that asking me for my input means getting an answer that is honest, but not one they might want to hear (and that answer might be "I don't know.").

They don’t always give it much weight, but at least they ask.

Those folks are not always the ones you might consider “nice,” though.

Just anectdata, though, and the community we share has some traits that reward Honesty and seeking counsel from others.

> Branson is supposed to be a really decent chap.

Do yourself a favour and read the Tom Bower biographies of him, e.g. Branson: Behind The Mask

In fact, you can a get a good understanding of him indirectly through the testimony in Tubular Bells: the Mike Oldfield story https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=877&v=UQLDGpcgNTM e.g. John Giddings says of Branson "He was a chancer. He was prepared to gamble and go for it. He was percieved as a visionary, putting it all together, but really he was importing records illegally and flogging them, right? He was a second-hand car salesman."

That doesn't necessarily mean he was a not-nice person.

He's actually fairly well-known for treating his employees well. One of the reasons his TV show wasn't so popular, was because he wasn't into pitting the contestants against each other, and firing the losers.

Fun Fact: Richard Branson had such an antagonistic relationship with Mike Oldfield, that Oldfield included a segment in one of his albums where he plays a guitar with staccato notes that spelled out "Fuck Off R.B." in morse code[1], recording under Branson's own label.

1: https://www.mikeoldfield.org/amarok

Is this really true? Arguable lance stroll is better than Logan in f1.

Arguably Logan was in F1 to draw American audiences and sponsors, also his uncle is a billionaire.

The comment did not make clear she bought the position. It almost seemed more like it was implying anyone who is family of some rich guy can't accomplish anything themselves.

It says this is the company that produced, among other films, She? Did Megan Ellison have anything to do with it?

"Producer" == $WALLET

Her

It's just as weird that it happens twice in Hollywood today. Another of Larry Ellison's nepo baby heirs runs Skydance, which has had a bit more success in "blockbuster" terms (and has recently been flirting with buying CBS Viacom aka Paramount).

Wow, I didn't make the last name connection until reading this thread. The Wikipedia page[1] for Annapurna Pictures doesn't even mention that the founder is the child of a billionaire. It just kind of implies the founder dabbled in film school for two semesters, went off to travel the world, and then -poof- a media production company is conjured into existence. Pretty rosy depiction of nepotism.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annapurna_Pictures

Until she got bored, anyway. You know, I also feel I have "grown secluded" from my day job.

> After a series of underperforming productions, in 2019 Ellison had grown secluded from Hollywood, leaving Annapurna to be mostly ran by Nathan Gary, who led Annapurna Interactive before being promoted to president. She left to Lanai, a Hawaiian island owned by her father, and remained there as the COVID-19 pandemic forced people to remain isolated.

Not really nepotism. Megan is one of Hollywoods best producers. Far better than her father in his job.

Another lawnmower is born.

For those who don’t get the lawnmower reference, take 5 minutes and have a hearty laugh: https://youtube.com/watch?t=1980&v=-zRN7XLCRhc

(Start at the 33 minute mark if it doesn’t jump you there.)

PSA: it’s a link to Bryan Cantrill ranting about the Sun / Oracle acquisition. I couldn’t make it through 5 minutes of his ranting to get to an accurate summary of the joke though.

> You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle.

> "Oh they wanted to kill OpenSolaris!" No, the lawnmower doesn't care about OpenSolaris, the lawnmower doesn't think about OpenSolaris, the lawnmower _can't_ care about OpenSolaris. The lawnmower can't have empathy.

The lawnmower joke is here: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?feature=shared&t=2303 at the 38:23 mark.

That rant is famous, but I always wonder at the naivety of Cantrill and friends. Ellison was already known for being a shameless shark since the '80s, 20 years before the SUN acquisition. Believing he would leave your little blade of grass untouched was always going to be fanciful - particularly when they were a loss-making part of the company with no-future already.

I think there's plenty of people who the internet or gossip circles hate where that hate is unjustified. At the same time, a lot of the worst people are initially quite personally charming and keep that face even as they screw you over. And I think when people come into contact that they've only heard about in gossip in person, there's quite often an attempt to be like "well that's the caricature of Larry Ellison, maybe he's not actually that bad". Face to face contact can weight quite heavily compared to "people on the internet".

Combine the two of them and you get a recipe for people to give Larry Ellison the benefit of the doubt, taking a "well we're adults, let's handle this more maturely than immediately doubting our counter party" stance, even as people who by their own accounts had heard otherwise. Ultimately in this case, Cantrill's experience proved "the internet" right, but I think even that might not prevent someone else repeating the same situation in the future.

This is extremely well articulated, and is exactly true in my experience.

People take gossip as "gossip"- an unrealiable approximation and gross-oversimplification of an individual. Thus give people with poor reputations the benefit of the doubt, believing themselves to be open minded. (which is true).

When they are shown just how 1-dimensional some people can actually be, and that the gossip depicts people precisely, it can be jarring. Especially as, like you mention, many people are very personable, charismatic, charming etc;

Idi Amin could be quite charming. Same for another dictator, who will not be mentioned, at the risk of Godwining the conversation.

He could talk to a family, leave them smitten and hopeful, then whisper "Kill them" to the guard, on his way out.

Just think about the exceptionally gifted "10x" engineers we all meet from time to time. There are people equally gifted in charisma and manipulation, they can predict what people are feeling and steer them where they want them with high success rates. This is what I think of whenever I see a politician on video or meet one in person.

It’s why I now doubt the motives of all people that seem too personable :/

From murders to politicians to CEOs, nearly every impactful predator has a lot of positive qualities as well.

You don't rise to the top of the food chain without having some really sociopathic/narcisisstic traits.

But, you also don't rise to the top of the food chain solely by being terrible all of the time. And IMO/IME lot of those "good traits in bad people" honestly are genuine, not just facades.

This is not to excuse the bad people of the world. It's just... honestly, as a middle-aged person myself... it has been the hardest thing for me to wrap my head around as an adult. The rest of the stuff, I was prepared for, on some level.

"Motives are rarely unselfish". That's good enough.

I joke that Larry is from that evil Star Trek universe and somewhere in the multiverse a clean-shaven, teddy bear of a man is trapped in a universe full of assholes because he was tricked into swapping with this Larry.

It's a funny joke, but I think it downplays how much of our world is led, run, and inhabited by assholes. It's more likely that we are living in the Asshole Universe and there is a parallel universe out there where being the asshole is an outlier.

Given the situation that IP was in at the time, I'm not sure it was a "believe" so much as a "hope". There wasn't much of an alternative.

It would have made so much more sense to sell to IBM though, and I don’t even like IBM. I respected their R&D at the time, but their global services division is a blight on society.

I can’t recall, did the feds block that option?

IBM was only interested in Java and lowballed the price.

Oracle was interested in hardware too, and offered more money.

IIRC, reports were that IBM negotiated the price down with a stinky "who else is ever going to buy you" attitude, and were blindsided once Ellison came into the picture offering more cash.

Yah.. it was well known but when it happens to you it's hard to really not try to be open minded. That is why his rant is so famous.

I was rolled up into Oracle through a series of acquisitions a few years before Sun.. it all went down the same way. You know what's going to happen but it's still a shock when a manager you knew before you joined Oracle and wouldn't have behaved the Oracle way instructs you to lie to a customer cause "that's how it's done here and we're going to have to go along with it."

You also don't realize how shocking it's going to be to see the office re-decorated until they come in and rip everything down and put up pictures of Larry's boats and airplanes and other toys.

When we were acquired Larry Ellison got on a big conference call we were all allowed to join and we could raise a virtual hand and ask questions. To his credit he answered everything 100% truthfully and transparently, and the questions were answered exactly the way the Internet expects he would answer.

Well at least he has been honest. Honesty is a luxury merchandise you can purchase with a few billion dollars for sure.

To be a billionaire you need colluders.

I thought Sun was just a little misguided and naive and then they sold to Ellison and I realized they were a bunch of fucking morons. WHY? WHY DID YOU DO THIS??

Cantrill and friends just worked there, but the board presumably knew what they were doing.

There was a Wired article that told me everything I needed to know about Larry, the way your blind date being mean to the waiter tells you not to make a second date. It was about the best smart homes. It came out during the DotCom boom, before Sun folded. Larry had one of the smartest homes in America. It had a remote control. One Saturday evening, the article reports, he got furious with the system because it wasn’t working, so he threw the remote and smashed it.

Then he called the company and demanded a new one. Someone had to drive, 45 minutes if memory serves, to his house to deliver a new remote, on their Saturday night, because some petulant man-child had a temper tantrum and couldn’t wait until Monday.

Fuck that guy.

How much of a pain in the ass you have to be in the interview process for a writer to drop that anecdote into the article? You know we are only getting part of that story.

> I thought Sun was just a little misguided and naive and then they sold to Ellison and I realized they were a bunch of fucking morons. WHY? WHY DID YOU DO THIS??

Whatever you think of Oracle and the One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison, IBM as a company are likely worse. Sun had a "west coast wheeler-dealer" vibe, as did Oracle. IBM had an "east coast button-down shirt" vibe. IBM had first dibs and Sun said "no, I may be desperate but I'm not that desperate"

If Sun had to be sold (which it did because it was consistently losing money hand over fist) and there was a choice of IBM, HP and Oracle to sell it to, and only those three, which would you pick?

If you've never experienced the IBM culture, this is a great essay about Don Estridge (father of the IBM PC) which will give you a good flavour of the company: https://every.to/the-crazy-ones/the-misfit-who-built-the-ibm...

I wonder if Dell’s story arc would have been different if they bought Sun. And I wonder how different the Cloud would be if they had. Did they even have the cash then?

IBM needed one thing from SUN: Java.

Oracle needed two things from SUN: Java and hardware.

Nobody else had the money or the inclination to buy the company. Going with Ellison was the least-worst option.

I just find it funny how people who very obviously had it coming (i.e. Solaris, various opensource projects, etc - stuff that very obviously wasn't making money and would likely never make money), didn't see it coming.

"Don't anthropomorphize Larry Ellison"

Funniest thing I've heard in a while!

Or don't waste 5 minutes on this for that.

Direct links pointing closer, and the transcript are available in this thread. (At the bottom, for some reasons.)

Hardly a waste, unless you hate to be entertained.

Counterpoint: That was an excellent use of my 5 minutes.

Larry Ellison is the only person I can think of that I instantly know what video is being linked when someone shares a link.

You grow up an Ellison, I figure you either end up just like daddy, a social justice warrior with means, or like Mary Trump, a psychologist. Just so you can unpack your fucked up family and help others.

Or like Abigail Disney

She seems to be leaning toward the sjw trope.

And then there’s Sarah Winchester, who instead of becoming the psychologist, became a case study in psychology.

I should have read this thread, it would have saved me the couple of minutes to get the exact same link you just did!

I named my lawnmower Larry.

"Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison!" bahahah

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