Larry Ellison once renamed a superyacht because its name spelled backwards was ‘I’m a Nazi’

JTA – Larry Ellison, the Jewish founder of Oracle and a major pro-Israel donor, has recently been in the headlines for his media acquisition ventures with his son. 

The new scrutiny on the family has surfaced a decades-old detail about Ellison: that he once rechristened a superyacht after realising that its original name carried an antisemitic tinge. 

In 1999, Ellison – then number 23 on Forbes’ billionaires list, well on his way to his number 4 ranking today – purchased a boat called Izanami. 

Originally built for a Japanese businessman, the 191-foot (58m) superyacht was named for a Shinto deity. But Ellison soon realised what the name read backwards: “I’m a Nazi.” 

“Izanami and Izanagi are the names of the two Shinto deities that gave birth to the Japanese islands, or so legend has it,” Ellison said in Softwar, a 2013 biography. “When the local newspapers started pointing out that Izanami was ‘I’m a Nazi’ spelled backward, I had the choice of explaining Shintoism to the reporters at the San Francisco Chronicle or changing the name of the boat.” He renamed the boat ‘Ronin’ and later sold it. 

The decades-old factoid resurfaced this week because of a New York Magazine profile of Ellison’s son, David Ellison, the chairperson and chief executive of Paramount-Skydance Corporation. 

Skydance Corporation, which David Ellison founded in 2006, completed an $8 billion (R131.2 billion) merger last year with Paramount Global. Larry Ellison, meanwhile, joined an investor consortium that signed a deal to purchase TikTok, the social media juggernaut accused of spreading antisemitism. Together, father and son also staged a hostile bid to purchase Warner Bros, but were outmatched by Netflix. 

After acquiring Paramount, David Ellison appointed The Free Press founder Bari Weiss as the editor-in-chief of CBS News in an endorsement of Weiss’s contrarian and pro-Israel outlook that has been challenged as overly friendly to the Trump administration. 

Larry Ellison, who was raised in a Reform Jewish home by his adoptive Jewish parents, has long been a donor to pro-Israel and Jewish causes, including to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. In September, he briefly topped the Bloomberg Billionaires Index as the world’s richest man. 

In December, Oracle struck a deal to provide cloud services for TikTok, with some advocates hoping for tougher safeguards against antisemitism on the social media platform.