The Most Powerful Man You’ve Never Thought About

GriftMatrix Tech Oligarchy The AI Files By
Who is the most powerful man you have never thought about?

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, and after the election he joined the tech crowd 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 hosts the U.S. user data and the algorithm on its cloud, for an app TikTok says more than 200 million Americans use. 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 – the first when a winter storm knocked out power at an Oracle data center – which is not exactly inspiring confidence from the company that just became the backbone of one of America’s biggest social platforms.

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 for unclassified data. All of this happened in the last few months – with no public congressional hearings, according to the 50501 Movement.

Meanwhile, his son David runs Paramount Skydance, which owns CBS. The FCC approved that merger in July 2025 – right after Paramount agreed to pay $16 million toward Trump’s future presidential library and legal costs 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 in December – and more than $45 billion of the final deal. On February 27th – the day before 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 expected this spring.

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 forced a sale, and the government 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, according to the 50501 Movement.

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

Correction, September 27th, 2026: This essay first said the WBD board signed the merger agreement the same day the U.S. launched strikes on Iran – it signed the day before. It also said the shareholder vote was March 20th – that meeting was for the old Netflix deal and had already been canceled. It also said TikTok is America’s most-used social platform – YouTube and Facebook are. And it said Congress demanded TikTok’s oversight setup – Congress forced the sale, and the oversight setup came out of executive-branch negotiations.

Update, September 27th, 2026: A few lines now say who says so, and a few now match the sources more closely – Oracle’s role at TikTok, the security level of the Pentagon clearance, where the $16 million went, and Larry’s guarantee on the final deal. Two more now say Ellison joined the tech crowd at Mar-a-Lago after the election, and what caused TikTok’s first outage.

Everything I have written about AI is in one place at rachelandthecity.com/the-ai-files.