The Most Powerful Man You’ve Never Thought About

GriftMatrix Tech Oligarchy

So, you think Elon Musk is a threat to democracy? Larry Ellison just said, “Hold my beer…”

Ellison told a room full of investors that citizens will be “on their best behavior because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.” He said that in 2024. Out loud. On camera.

Two years later, he controls more of your life than almost any person alive.

Here’s how it happened. Ellison founded Oracle in 1977 – originally a CIA database project, which is a detail he doesn’t exactly lead with at dinner parties. Oracle became the backend infrastructure of the internet, the unsexy plumbing that governments, militaries, and hospitals run on. Most people have no idea what Oracle is. That’s sort of the point.

Ellison has been cultivating a relationship with Trump since at least 2020, when he hosted a fundraiser at his Rancho Mirage estate with tickets reportedly running up to $250,000 for access. Court records show he was also on a call with Trump supporters after the election discussing ways to challenge the results. From that point, the relationship deepened steadily. He dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. He showed up at the White House in January 2025 when Trump announced Project Stargate, a $500 billion AI infrastructure initiative with Oracle as a cornerstone partner.

So let’s run the tab on what Ellison has collected since that investment in access.

As of January 22nd, Oracle owns a 15% stake in TikTok’s U.S. joint venture and controls the data storage and algorithm retraining for an app used by 170 million Americans. Trump personally said he’d “like Larry to buy” TikTok. Oracle got the deal. The app has already had two outages since the sale closed – both blamed on Oracle server failures, which is not exactly inspiring confidence from the company that just became the backbone of America’s most-used social platform.

Oracle also won a cloud modernization contract with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services – the agency managing healthcare data for roughly 150 million Americans. Oracle just won an $88 million Air Force cloud contract. And in February, the U.S. government authorized Oracle to run generative AI on federal data at the highest civilian and Defense Department security levels. All of this happened in the last few months, with no public congressional hearings.

Meanwhile, his son David runs Paramount Skydance, which owns CBS. The FCC approved that merger in July 2025 – right after Paramount paid Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit Trump filed against CBS over a 60 Minutes interview, a lawsuit that legal experts widely called baseless. Stephen Colbert’s Late Show got canceled. Bari Weiss was installed as CBS News editor-in-chief. The FCC chairman’s official approval statement said Americans “no longer trust the legacy national news media.” The deal went through.

Then David went after Warner Bros. Discovery. Larry personally guaranteed $40 billion of the bid. On February 27th – the same day the U.S. launched strikes on Iran – the WBD board signed the merger agreement. CNN. HBO. Warner Bros. Pictures. DC Studios. Paramount+. CBS. MTV. Nickelodeon. One family. The shareholder vote is March 20th.

The Vanderbilts owned railroads. The Rockefellers owned oil. NPR put it plainly: in the attention economy, control over media and behavioral data could be worth more than either.

The playbook here isn’t complicated. You donate to the right people, you show up at the right events, you make the right phone calls – and the regulatory machinery that’s supposed to ask hard questions about monopoly power and data security just… waves you through. Congress spent years grilling TikTok about Chinese data access and demanded an entire oversight architecture before it could keep operating. Oracle got the Medicare contract and the military AI clearance without a single public hearing.

Ellison told investors he wants a world where Oracle is the steward of all the data and everyone behaves because they know they’re being watched. He’s not hiding the vision. He’s just betting – correctly, so far – that nobody’s paying attention.

Sources