Larry Ellison’s name isn’t always mentioned alongside more public-facing megabillionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg. But as he vaults to the top of the U.S. power elite after a string of high-profile corporate deals, that’s about to change.
Ellison, the founder of the tech giant Oracle, is quickly emerging as the new face of oligarchic power in the U.S. Oracle has become an AI powerhouse at the same time Ellison and his son David have acquired Paramount and its vast media empire. With Donald Trump’s recent executive order, Ellison and Oracle will also now oversee TikTok’s algorithms, shaping a platform that reaches 150 million U.S. users.
What’s more alarming than Ellison’s sheer wealth — in September, he briefly surpassed Musk as the world’s richest person — is that he’s building his concentrated power and control in collaboration with the Trumpian project of attacking so-called “wokeness,” all while supercharging the corporate expansion of artificial intelligence and tech surveillance.
Moreover, Ellison is a vocal supporter of the Israeli military and a close confidant of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As Israel looks to repair its image after two years of overseeing a genocide in Gaza, it’ll have a powerful booster in Ellison and his new media kingdom.
The Making of a Megabillionaire
Larry Ellison founded Oracle in 1977 and was its CEO for nearly four decades. The firm ascended by providing database software for business and government agencies. Oracle’s first customer was the CIA, and the company is named after a CIA project.
Over time, Oracle has swelled into a business empire focused on cloud services and, increasingly, artificial intelligence.
Today, Ellison is worth more than $350 billion. He owns more than 40 percent of Oracle’s stock and still serves as the corporation’s executive chairman and chief technology officer. Ellison was also on Tesla’s board of directors from 2018 to 2022 and holds a 1.4 percent stake in the company that’s worth billions.
Ellison lives an extravagant lifestyle. He owns properties across the world worth nearly $2 billion, including a dozen mansions and estates from California to Rhode Island, Florida to New Jersey, and London to Japan.
In 2012, he bought nearly all of Lānaʻi, Hawaii’s sixth-biggest island, reshaping it as a paradise for the super-rich while immiserating longtime inhabitants.
Ellison also enjoys luxury private jets and a $160 million mega-yacht with a gym, spa, movie theater, and basketball court. A trailing boat reportedly collects balls that bounce overboard. His collection of Japanese art and artifacts is worth around $86 million.
Trump-Tied AI Deals
But far more than wealth and luxury, Ellison has power. Notably, he’s forged a close relationship with Donald Trump, with one Trump adviser calling him a “shadow president of the United States.”
While Ellison hasn’t directly donated to Trump, he personally hosted a major 2020 Trump fundraiser. Ellison also joined a November 2020 call “where Trump staffers and supporters discussed strategies for challenging their candidate’s loss at the ballot box,” according to The Washington Post.
Safra Catz, who served as Oracle’s CEO from 2014 to 2025 and is now its billionaire executive vice chair, donated over $130,000 toward Trump’s 2020 presidential run (though to be sure, Oracle’s PAC showers money on both parties).
Ellison’s support for Trump is now paying off, helping to “secure Oracle’s place at the table,” says the Financial Times, as Trump advances massive business deals tied to his political agenda.
This is seen starkly in Oracle’s stunning ascendency in the rush around generative AI. Oracle has rapidly secured nearly a half-trillion dollars in contracts to supply computing power through data centers to AI companies, joining the ranks of powerhouses like Microsoft and Amazon.
A huge swath of Oracle’s AI business comes from a $300 billion deal with OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. Oracle’s partnership with OpenAI was supercharged by Trump’s announcement in January of the Stargate AI joint venture, which The New York Times called an “early trophy” for Trump.
Indeed, Stargate is just one expression of the mutually beneficial alliance that Ellison has forged with Trump. Oracle’s expanding partnership with OpenAI reflects a new primacy for Ellison within the AI boom that is increasingly driving the entire U.S. economy.
Media Mogul
This should raise alarm bells, especially since Ellison has openly celebrated AI’s ability to surveil people, pronouncing in 2024 that “citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
Ellison’s alliance with Trump is also transforming him into an unrivaled media mogul.
His family’s media company, Skydance, which is financially backed by Larry Ellison and run by his son David, struck a deal in 2024 to acquire Paramount, owner of CBS and a top-five movie studio along with a slew of popular cable channels. The $8 billion merger closed in August 2025, creating Paramount Skydance, overseen by David Ellison, who was photographed with Trump at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event in April. (Hours after the Ultimate Fighting Championship match, Trump attacked CBS on social media).
The Ellisons’ Paramount deal was greased by accommodating Trump’s attack against the media. In July, Paramount agreed to settle a lawsuit from Trump, which claimed that CBS interfered in the 2024 election. Just weeks later, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved the Ellisons’ acquisition.
The FCC’s approval was accompanied by a polemical statement from FCC Chairman Brendan Carr that “Americans no longer trust the legacy national news media to report fully, accurately, and fairly,” and that the new owners will “adopt measures that can root out the bias” and not establish “invidious forms of DEI discrimination.”
Soon after, the Ellisons signaled their rightward swing with the $150-million hiring of Bari Weiss, founder of the anti-“woke” Free Press, as CBS News’s editor-in-chief, and their appointment of Kenneth Weinstein, former head of the conservative Hudson Institute think tank, as CBS’s new ombudsman, a position they agreed to fill as part of the merger’s approval.
Like the robber barons of the late 19th-century U.S., Ellison is consolidating his control over a vast corporate empire that dominates major sectors, from cloud storage and AI data centers, to iconic movie studios, mass news channels, and social media.
The Ellisons’ quest for media dominance doesn’t end with Paramount. They’re reportedly eying Warner Brothers, the iconic movie studio and owner of CNN and HBO. Such an acquisition, which would need the Trump administration’s approval, would create a media empire transcending even Rupert Murdoch’s conglomerate.
And then came the TikTok deal.
The New King of TikTok
Donald Trump attacked TikTok for years as part of his wider campaign against China, but the effort to ban the app gathered momentum in 2024.
As Israel carried out its genocide in Gaza, many politicians blamed the popular app, which has 150 million U.S. users who skew young, for spreading anti-Israel views because its algorithms showed the vast scale of Gaza’s destruction and the killing of Palestinians.
Congress passed a bill to ban TikTok unless it was sold off to U.S. owners, and the sale has sat in limbo until now.
Trump’s new TikTok deal is expected to place a U.S. version of the app within the hands of a coterie of billionaires that include Trump-aligned magnates like Michael Dell, Jeff Yass, Rupert Murdoch, and Marc Andreessen.
But Larry Ellison is the true winner of Trump’s TikTok decree. In addition to a “rumored” 15 percent stake in the app, Oracle will serve as the “security provider” overseeing TikTok’s algorithms in the U.S.Trump joked that he’d like to make TikTok’s algorithm “100% MAGA” when he signed the new executive order in September.
For Ellison, all his new acquisitions present the opportunity to forge a truly novel corporate mega-empire that will dominate the U.S. media and attention economy, injecting his agenda like a thread across an AI-powered chain of news outlets, streaming sites, film studios, and social media outlets.
“We Love the Country of Israel”
“These are very smart people, and none of this is accidental,” noted one business professor.
All of this is very good for Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s vast influence operation.
Ellison is a staunch backer of Israel. He is one of the top donors to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF), a U.S. nonprofit that effectively subsidizes the Israeli military. Ellison has given the FIDF at least $26.6 million.
“I feel a deep emotional connection to the State of Israel and the Israeli people,” Ellison said at the 2014 FIDF gala. “We love the country of Israel and we’ll do everything we can to support the country of Israel,” he added, with his “we” seeming to refer to Oracle.
Ellison is also extremely close to Netanyahu, who has been accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court over Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Netanyahu has vacationed at Ellison’s island in Hawaii, and Ellison maneuvered to push Israeli billionaire Arnon Milchan to allow Milchan’s star attorney to represent Netanyahu in one of his corruption cases. Milchan was hesitant but “he relented after pressure from Ellison,” reports the Times of Israel. Ellison is also mentioned in two of Netanyahu’s corruption cases.
Drop Site News reports that Ellison once vetted Secretary of State Marco Rubio for “fealty to Israel” with Ron Prosor, then-Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. Hacked emails show that Prosor updated Ellison in 2015 and 2016 on Israel’s actions at the United Nations and referred to a meeting where Ellison expressed “a wish to get more involved in Israel.”
Ellison is also a backer of former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair and has given or pledged at least $348 million to Blair’s Institute for Global Change. Blair could be part of Trump’s “Board of Peace” in Gaza if the current ceasefire deal holds.
Leaked emails published in Responsible Statecraft also reveal that in 2015, Oracle’s then-CEO Safra Catz urged former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to be a consulting producer for a TV show about the Israeli military to shape U.S. public opinion in Israel’s favor and combat the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement.
“We believe that we have to embed the love and respect for Israel in the American culture,” the Israeli-born Catz told Barak. As a top Oracle executive, Catz likely “oversaw much of the negotiations involving the TikTok purchase,” notes Responsible Statecraft.
Netanyahu recently called TikTok “the most important purchase going on right now,” adding that “weapons change over time,” and the most important ones today “are on social media.”
Now Oracle, led by Netanyahu’s friend and staunch ally Larry Ellison, is overseeing TikTok’s U.S. algorithms.
There are already clear signs of Ellison’s intent to take his new media empire in a pro-Israel direction, including his hiring of Weiss as CBS News’s editor-in-chief. The billionaire-courting Weiss is a staunch Zionist whose Free Press has stoked “genocide denial” with an “investigation” into “preexisting health conditions” of starving Palestinian children, notes The Intercept.
Modern-Day Robber Baron
Like the robber barons of the late 19th-century U.S., Ellison is consolidating his control over a vast corporate empire that dominates major sectors, from cloud storage and AI data centers, to iconic movie studios, mass news channels, and social media.
And clearly, Ellison is bringing his politics with him: Trump-aligned, anti-“woke,” and staunchly pro-Israel.
“Everything is consolidating,” media historian Michael Socolow told The New York Times. “What makes these deals different is that they are across multiple platforms.”
“To have the opportunity to establish an editorial line across TikTok, CBS News and CNN — that’s a new world,” Socolow added.
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