Oracle billionaire CEO Larry Ellison is aggressively moving into media and military contracting to consolidate his power in the Trump 2.0 era.
Larry Ellison’s ambitions have been known in Silicon Valley for a long time, as this 2003 biography’s title reveals:
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) August 11, 2025
If you don’t have time to read a full book but want to learn more about Larry Ellison, you might want to skim this picture-heavy biography of Larry Ellison from Yahoo Finance, looks like they converted a click-heavy slideshow into an easy scroll and scan.
But in the Trump 2.0 era, it’s not enough to be a tech titan, Ellison’s moved from databases into media, AI, and military tech, and has some media outlets calling him America’s most powerful man.
I’ve written previously about the Ellison family’s take over of Paramount.
Today another shoe dropped in that drama as The Ultimate Fighting Championship announced that Paramount had acquired the exclusive streaming rights for the mixed martial arts promotion in a multi-billion dollar deal that exceeded the most optimistic expectations for the price of that deal.
The NYT has background on the deal:
Paramount announced Monday morning that it had struck a seven-year $7.7 billion deal to claim exclusive streaming and broadcast rights in the United States for the Ultimate Fighting Championship. The deal will go into effect next year.
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The new deal will replace a yearslong arrangement between U.F.C. and ESPN, and effectively doubles the total fee the sport will take in. ESPN currently pays roughly $550 million a year for U.F.C. coverage.Paramount and TKO said that the seven-year deal has an average yearly value of $1.1 billion, though “the contract’s payment schedule is weighted more toward the back end of the deal.”
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Mr. Trump has been a fan of the sport for years, and the U.F.C. chief executive, Dana White, is a close ally. The president was spotted at a U.F.C. fight in April, sitting near Mr. Ellison as well as Ari Emanuel, the chief executive of TKO.Mr. Trump has also said that he wants to stage a U.F.C. fight on the White House grounds next year, around the July 4 holiday. Mr. Emanuel and Mr. Shapiro confirmed in an interview the likelihood of the fight, which would be streamed on Paramount+ and possibly broadcast on CBS.
Why did the Ellison’s overpay for the UFC’s streaming rights?
Simple, the UFC’s owner, Hollywood super agent, Ari Emanuel helped them acquire Paramount in what The New York Times called “one of the most tortured deals the media sector has seen in years.”
Emanuel voiced his support of the deal in May, 2024 at what The Financial Times called “a precarious moment for Ellison’s bid.”
More recently, Emanuel hosted President Trump and David Ellison cageside at two UFC events where the POTUS and the nepo-baby media mogul were seen talking animatedly and at one point Emanuel even stepped in, apparently to calm the pair and smooth things over.
And just in case anyone thought that young David Ellison was actually in charge, information has come to light showing who will actually control Paramount:
a new document filed with the Federal Communications Commission indicates that his father — Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle — will be the real power behind the throne, replacing Shari Redstone as the company’s most influential shareholder.
The document, obtained by The New York Times, lists Larry Ellison at the top of an organizational chart of the companies that will acquire the majority of Paramount’s voting interest currently owned by Ms. Redstone.
The document, part of an application to the Federal Communications Commission to transfer control of Paramount’s TV stations, lays out the complex web of companies that will acquire Ms. Redstone’s controlling stake. Pinnacle Media, the Ellison family investment vehicle, will own 77.5 percent of the voting interest currently owned by Ms. Redstone, according to the document. The rest will go to an entity affiliated with RedBird Capital Partners, which backs Skydance.
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“Maybe Larry Ellison will give David free rein,” said Brian Quinn, a professor at Boston College Law School. “Perhaps, Larry will call all the shots, or maybe just the big shots. We just don’t know. It seems, however, that Larry Ellison will have ultimate control.”
The only mystery in this deal is why the Ellisons needed help with Trump given Larry’s early and hearty support for the Donald’s presidential aspirations:
Larry Ellison’s journey to this level of wealth and power—both political and cultural—would not have happened had he not solidified his relationship with Trump long before any of these other tech CEOs came to embrace him. (Peter Thiel is perhaps the sole exception here.) After Donald Trump was first elected president in 2016, Oracle CEO Safra Catz joined the executive committee for Trump’s transition team and occasionally advised him during that first term, while still working with Ellison. In November 2020, after Ellison’s prior fundraisers failed to boost Trump to reelection, the tech titan joined a group call with Sean Hannity and Sen. Lindsey Graham, among others, to discuss how to contest the election results. After the Jan. 6 insurrection, Oracle’s political action committee pledged to no longer back the politicians who’d objected to the Electoral College’s certification of Biden’s victory—only to quickly turn on that promise during the 2022 midterms, donating to election deniers like Reps. Steve Scalise, Jim Banks, Jim Jordan, Ralph Norman, and Darrell Issa. That same year, Ellison also invested in Musk’s far-right Twitter takeover.
The multibillionaire simultaneously began positioning himself closer to Mar-a-Lago, investing amply in a small island town close to Trump’s Florida residence and transforming it into a hub for the country’s wealthiest to congregate. As such, although he initially backed Sen. Tim Scott for the 2024 GOP nomination, it was easy for Ellison to begin dining with Trump again as the ex-president’s candidacy seemed assured—and for Oracle to begin working with the Heritage Foundation to compile a database of potential Trump appointees who’d be unfailingly loyal. Larry Ellison joined the Silicon Valley adviser army that descended upon Mar-a-Lago when Trump won reelection, then went on to cheer Musk’s DOGE rampage and propose that all “national data” be put into a singular database that would feed an A.I. model—a vision that may be in reach thanks to the action plan, whose data-concentration goals would build upon DOGE’s addition of A.I. to various government functions.
Now, just six months into Trump’s term, Ellison has procured for himself a sweeping empire, ruling over acres’ worth of A.I. infrastructure, gaining a megasized media arm for himself via Paramount-Skydance, potentially winning another powerful media apparatus with TikTok, and seeing his own ideologies and goals reflected by a friendly White House. The Trump 2.0 era has been spectacular for “one rich asshole called Larry Ellison”—mostly because he’s done so much to shape it.
To understand the 80-year-old Larry Ellison, it’s worthwhile to grasp Oracle’s place in the tech wars. Basically, they’re a 90’s era company that fell behind by the 2010s and seized on AI and Large Language Models as a way of staying relevants. From Not Boring:
by the 2010’s Oracle looked to be losing. After leading the way in enterprise databases and integrated software for years, competing fiercely for market share, Oracle missed three successive waves in computing: the internet, mobile, and finally, the cloud.
While Oracle was able to continue earning money from its extensive enterprise and government contracts which were locked in for years, and was able to hang on to relevance by using its distributional advantage with its existing customers to ship Oracle versions of emerging platforms and software, by 2016 things looked pretty grim. Oracle had ceded much of cloud to AWS, and Microsoft had started to muscle in with its own customer relationships to Fortune 500s and governments.
While still a titan, Oracle’s lack of innovation seemed to predict a steady slide into irrelevance. Yet over the last few years, the company has made a stunning comeback, somehow indispensable to the biggest players.
The straightforward business reason is that Oracle effectively positioned itself through massive investment in GPU datacenters to become one of the go-to players for training large language models, especially among its government and large enterprise customer base. The early miss on cloud also turned out to be an advantage, as AWS, Microsoft, and Google chose Oracle as a neutral service provider to help run their AI-focused datacenters.
The New York Times has also reported on Larry Ellison and his vision for the future:
Mr. Ellison has recently been trying to make the world better by pushing for a surveillance society. There would be cameras everywhere, with every movement analyzed by A.I.
“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on,” he told Oracle investors last fall. “It’s unimpeachable.”
Also on Mr. Ellison’s to-do list is combining thousands of databases into one enormous electronic repository, which can be mined by A.I. That will cure diseases and fix everything else, he told Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, at a symposium on reinventing government held in Dubai in February.
“I think this will make for a happier citizenry,” Mr. Ellison, who appeared via video, told Mr. Blair.
To realize his most benevolent vision for mankind, Larry Ellison and Oracle have agreed to spend $40 billion on Nvidia chips for OpenAI’s data centers as part of the so-called Stargate project that was announced by President Trump himself at the White House.
Although, The Information reported that this deal might be more than a little overhyped:
Stargate—an up to $500 billion venture announced by OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle to build data centers for artificial intellegence—is “not formed yet,” Oracle CEO Safra Catz told investors Wednesday.
When Catz was asked by investors whether Oracle’s projections for a 70% growth rate in its cloud computing unit included contracts with Stargate, she didn’t answer the question directly, but hinted that they did not.
Oracle has struck deals with OpenAI to rent out Nvidia graphics processing units outside of Stargate. “We work with OpenAI,” Catz said. “Those are still small numbers in the scheme of everything else we’re doing, but it will ultimately be bigger.”
On Wednesday Oracle told investors that its remaining performance obligations, or contracts it signed but can’t fulfill due to supply constraints, total $138 billion. It’s unclear what time horizon those contracts cover, since Oracle’s cloud unit generated just $10 billion in the year ended in May. But Oracle founder Larry Ellison said on the call that if “Stargate turns out to be everything that is advertised,” the $138 billion in future contracts would be “understated.”
One thing that isn’t overhyped is Oracle’s relationship with Israel:
Oracle Corporation announced that “Oracle stands with Israel” on the front page of their website alongside an image of the State of Israel’s flag, a pledge of total support for the country’s government and defense establishment, all ending with “#istandwithisrael.” Oracle commits most of their direct support to Magen David Adom (MDA), an emergency response organization in Israel and Israeli-occupied areas, which human rights watchdog groups have long criticized.
The homepage promises that the corporation “will match our employee contributions — with no limit — to this vital organization,” a commitment on top of the $1 million that Oracle donated in October 2023.
However, the corporation’s financial commitment to the State of Israel began before October.
In 2021, Oracle became the first multinational tech company to offer cloud services in Israel when they established a $319 million underground center in Jerusalem hosting military, government, banking, and business data. Later that year, other tech giants Google and Amazon followed suit with specialized cloud services for the Israeli government and military.
In January 2024, Oracle CEO Safra Catz visited with right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss plans for a second Oracle cloud center in the country. Catz has a history of collaboration with far-right leadership, as she served on Donald Trump’s presidential transition advisory team in 2016, a partnership that has since led to multi-million dollar deals between Oracle and the United States government. Oracle now hosts heavily guarded information for the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Pentagon.
Of course, in the current era, even Larry Ellison needed the help of key Trump insiders to land the big deal with Israel, from 2021:
In late June, in the midst of the hot and sticky Israeli summer, an elegantly dressed American citizen landed at Ben Gurion Airport. It is doubtful whether his almost generic Israeli name, Ezra Cohen, evoked any curiosity among the staff of the Sheraton Hotel in Tel Aviv where he stayed and met with journalists. However, the 35-year-old who may look like a tourist who came to do some business and some lying around on the beach, is none other than the former Acting U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence during the Trump Administration.
Cohen, a former member of the American intelligence community, was called to Israel to carry out a special and sensitive task on behalf of the American software giant Oracle – disqualifying Google and Amazon, its competitors, from winning Israel’s cloud tender, the Nimbus project. Not only is this task worth a lot of money, NIS 4 billion ($1.2 billion) in the project’s first phase and another NIS 1-1.5 billion ($300-$500 million) annually, but it also provides strategic access to a comprehensive cloud infrastructure that provides services to the IDF, the Ministry of Defense and government ministries.
Cohen was just one of the heavy hitters that Oracle sent to Israel to apply pressure. Shortly after he arrived in Israel and asked to meet with journalists, in early July, Safra Catz, the CEO of Oracle, followed in his footsteps. “Larry Ellison (Oracle founder) and I are committed to Israel publicly and give from our time for it,” she said to the journalists who came to meet her. Offhandedly, she referred to Oracle’s loss in the tender saying “It is very difficult to understand the decision, perhaps they did not have all the relevant information before them.”
Never fear, the deal was done and the data center opened in 2021 and is now working on a second which will be built nine floors underground. The first data center was five floors underground and I wonder if it survived Israel’s 12 Day War with Iran:
The company’s Jerusalem data center is housed in a 14,000 sqm (460,000 sq ft) bunker located below five parking levels and a 17-story building in Jerusalem’s Har Hotzvim tech hub. Constructed by Bynet Data Communications, the facility extends over four floors at a depth of 50 meters (160 feet) below ground level.
Oracle is also frequently mentioned as a likely American buyer for TikTok, if President Trump ever succeeds in bullying the company into selling and Oracle has made its approach to information hygiene very clear, should it acquire the short-form video titan:
While the campaign against TikTok was led by China hawks in Washington, it was the ire of pro-Israel activists that perhaps best explains why Oracle is such a natural choice to take over the social media app.
The campaign to ban the app kicked into high gear after Hamas’s October 7 attack against Israel. The timing spurred talk that the push for a ban wasn’t just about American national security, but Israel’s too. Politicians even tied their campaigns against TikTok to alleged Hamas propaganda being hosted on the platform.
Oracle, which had already taken control of some of TikTok’s day-to-day operations, had taken a firm pro-Israel stance and, according to an Intercept investigation, clamped down on pro-Palestine activism inside the company.
Last November, Israeli American Oracle CEO Safra Catz told an Israeli business news outlet, “For employees, it’s clear: if you’re not for America or Israel, don’t work here—this is a free country.”
Collaborations between the company and Israeli government agencies have been wide-ranging, encompassing everything from direct technology work with the military to software intended to help Israel with public relations — including, according to internal company messages, on social media platforms like TikTok.
The same article hinted at more Oracle-Israel joint projects in service of Ellison’s vision for making the world better:
Not all of Oracle’s work in Israel, though, is publicized. Even as it announced its cloud computing deal, Oracle was working on a four-year highly confidential project with the Israeli Air Force called “Project Menta,” according to screenshots of Slack postings obtained by The Intercept. (Neither Oracle nor the Israeli Ministry of Defense responded to requests for comment.)
Project Menta, which was previously undisclosed, has allowed Israel’s air force to do a “bunch of important military stuff that we can’t share with you,” Shimon Levy, head of communications at Oracle Israel, wrote to colleagues on Slack in December 2021, according to three internal sources. Levy appended a sword emoji to his message.
In 2022, Levy also announced in the same channel that the Israeli military’s Unit 81 — essentially a technology solutions division housed within the country’s intelligence apparatus — was in the final stage of a three-year program with Oracle to expedite procurement by allowing every soldier to make their own military purchase requests.
That same year, Oracle hosted a hackathon with the Israeli military to “develop technical solutions to acute social challenges.”
Oracle is also deeply entangled in the UK’s info-security sphere per Mintpress News:
In 2020, software giant Oracle won a gigantic contract with the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) to provide it with cloud infrastructure, digital assistance, data visualization software, mobile hub and development tools. The military is far from the only British institution entrusting its most sensitive data to the Texas-based firm, however. The Home Office, Office of National Statistics and National Health Service, among others, also rely on Oracle databases to function.
MintPress also has some insights into how Oracle cut its deal with Britain:
For years before signing the MoD agreement, Oracle founder Larry Ellison had been ingratiating himself with the British establishment, employing all manner of well-connected individuals at his foundation. Among these included media executive and father-in-law of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Matthew Symonds, who earned over $600,000 per year as the executive director of the Larry Ellison Foundation. Richard Meredith, a longtime director of the U.K.’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, was also snapped up at a similar salary to become deputy executive director.
Many other well-connected British government officials, including Vel Gnanendran, went straight from the Larry Ellison Foundation into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and worked there at the time that the body signed off on the lucrative Oracle contracts. For years, the Larry Ellison Foundation also bankrolled the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, the former U.K. prime minister’s new political project.
Yet, just after as the partnership with the Ministry of Defence was secured, Ellison abruptly shut down his foundation, prompting speculation that it had fulfilled its purpose.
And in case you were worried that Oracle wasn’t hooked up enough, MintPress also related the company’s longstanding relationship with the CIA:
This should be of concern to everyone, as Oracle itself started off as a project for the Central Intelligence Agency. Indeed, Ellison named his company after Project Oracle, a 1970s CIA operation he worked on.
“Our very first customer was the Central Intelligence Agency,” Ellison boasted, telling the story of how, in 1977, the CIA commissioned his firm to build them a database. From there, Ellison immediately began pitching to other wings of the national security state, and within months had secured contracts with Navy Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence and the NSA. The bottomless pit of money available for the military has helped turn Oracle from a tiny operation to a $46 billion dollar per year behemoth.
One of Oracle’s largest deals came in 2020, when it was part of a consortium that won a 15-year contract with the CIA and the other 16 U.S. intelligence agencies said to be with tens of billions of dollars.
Part of the reason the CIA trusts Oracle is that the company’s upper echelons are filled with ex-CIA executives. A case in point is former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who was appointed to the company’s board in 2015. David Carney, who spent 32 years at the agency, rising to become its third-in-command, also joined Oracle, heading up its information assurance center.
Truly Larry Ellison is working very hard to realize his vision for a better world and what a vision it is.
