Billionaire forced to rename yacht after making horrific realisation about its name
People are only just realising why billionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellison was forced to rename his yacht.
The New York businessman, 81, co-founded the software company in 1977 and became one of the wealthiest entrepreneurs in the world.
He is currently five places below Elon Musk on Forbes' real-time list, with a net worth of $240.6 billion.
To seemingly celebrate becoming filthy rich back in 1999, Ellison named his new German-built yacht 'Izanami'.
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The 191-foot superyacht was named after a reference to Izanami-no-Mikoto, meaning 'She-who-invites' or the 'Female-who-invites'.
“Izanami and Izanagi are the names of the two Shinto deities that gave birth to the Japanese islands, or so legend has it,” Ellison - whose mother is Jewish - said in Softwar, a 2013 biography.
The issue was that Izanami backwards reads 'I’m a Nazi'.
“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 explained.
As a result, Ellison renamed the boat Ronin and sold it, with the New York Post reporting that it now belongs to Italian business executive and pharmaceutical industry leader Alessandro Del Bono.
The decades-old fact has come to light after New York Magazine did a profile of Ellison’s son, David Ellison, 43, the chair and CEO of Paramount-Skydance Corporation.
According to Celebrity Net Worth, the American film producer and former actor has a net worth of $500 million.
“The sooner my kids get experience dealing with the pluses and minuses of having a lot of money, the better,” Ellison said of wealth management.
Matthew Symonds, the author of Softwar, noted that Ellison hoped that his kids 'will get used to making the decisions that go with extreme wealth while they are still young enough to accept some parental guidance'.
"He says it’s like taking a drink. He’d prefer his children to learn to drink at home rather than discover alcohol for the first time when they passed some arbitrary age qualification," he explained.
"My personality fundamentally changed as a result of me becoming a father," the dad-of-six added in the book.
"Being a father made me sensitive to the needs and feelings of my kids, and then that gradually seeped over into my other relationships. I became a more considerate friend and partner. I grew up."
"Look, I run the company day to day. Make no mistake about that," David said at Bloomberg's Screentime media conference in Hollywood, adding that he was a 'phenomenal' mentor and 'we couldn't have a better relationship'.
Anish Vij