Part of it is that he has notoriously created a culture of selfishness and even dishonesty at Oracle. I once caught Oracle engineers trying to steal IBM proprietary source code while we were testing on-site at Oracle HQ. I watched them dismiss a unified-cache idea when my small company disclosed it to them under NDA, then add their own (inferior) implementation of the idea as a flagship feature in the next version of Oracle. I saw the many copies of "It is not sufficient for us to win, others must lose also" on Oracle employees' offices. I simply don't trust them, and a company that should have safety as a major goal (but unfortunately already doesn't) is the last place I'd want to see them involved.

They're like the Scientology of databases.

Well, it's sort of weird. He's never really been involved in a company that manufactures, i don't believe. Plus his legacy is that of maximizing licensing fees which isn't really in Tesla's wheelhouse given their history of opening patents.

Maybe he's being brought in to fight the right to repair and help lock down Tesla's to maximize some sort of dealer /service model?

Or maybe this is some sort of long play to get Tesla stuck on Oracle's platform :-)

See comment above comparing Ellison to an amoral lawnmower.

He's a corporate sociopath who focuses completely on squeezing the maximum possible revenue from customers by any means possible. This strategy often takes the form of threatening to sue customers after aggressive software audits. It seldom takes the form of trying to meet the customer's needs via good customer service or quality software.

This is just the weekly Tesla hate thread. You will see this sort of negativity around essentially every Tesla-related news item. It's actually an improvement over the near-daily nature of these threads from earlier this year.

To answer your question, this changes nothing. He's been a major shareholder for a long time and now he's 1 out of 11 board members.

Seems like more of the same. He'll be a hands-off board member. The board will continue letting Elon do whatever he wants, including the occasional Twitter meltdown.