What Larry Ellison Doesn’t Want You To Know

He thinks there is a single score for all of humanity,

and it is wealth,

it is a numbered list, he wants to be at the top of that list.

- This is America's digital landlord,

briefly, the world's richest man,

and the billionaire wax sculpture who's about to control all our TikTok data,

Larry Ellison.

His company, Oracle, already provides software to the NSA,

probably hosts your health insurance data and builds body cams and drones.

- We're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on.

The police will be on their best behavior. Citizens will be on their best behavior.

- And he's somehow angling for even more.

- The operations of this, kind of,

TikTok new company that would be U.S. based,

would be a joint venture,

that would be largely managed by Oracle,

which is Larry Ellison’s company.

- The TikTok deal will add our

favorite brainrot app to the giant blob that already controls most of our media

and sets up the dominoes for a full blown surveillance state.

- This whole issue of privacy is utterly fascinating to me.

Who's ever heard of this information being misused by the government?

- So if he's going to control all our data, I wanted to find out:

What does he believe, and what does that mean for us?

Some people have compared it to the oil boom and the railroad boom.

Larry Ellison is the robber baron of this era.

But instead of oil, you know, he's trafficking in data.

When it comes to Ellison’s early days,

the one thing to know is for someone

who would become one of the most

successful men in the tech sector, he did a lot more talking than typing.

Even before Oracle, he always knew how to pull the strings.

As vice president at a company called Precision Instruments in the 70s,

he was overseeing the search for another company

to come in and help with this struggling data project.

And this gave him an idea:

he and his former coworkers, Bob and Ed, made a company,

put in the lowest offer, and Larry gave his own new company the job.

Nice!

They eventually named this company Oracle after a CIA project

they had previously worked on, and Larry bought in at 60%.

But data storage in the 70s was crazy, and people were looking for ways

to simplify it.

This guy, named Ted Codd had published a theory

about how to digitally store and retrieve data more efficiently

using a new system

called the Relational Database.

But it didn't really exist yet, so IBM made a team

to create a preliminary version.

When they got it working, they published another paper on how.

So when the Oracle guys came across this, it was a total score.

Ellison's programmers could reassemble it like an IKEA directions manual,

and Larry could sell it.

And boom!

Free idea,

billion dollar software.

- The database is, is absolutely the most,

uh, technically innovative thing that they've done.

Everything they have built, they've ultimately built around that.

- Oracle had Ellison's talents as a salesman to thank

much more than his skill as a programmer.

He frequently promised programs to customers and delivered them late, never,

or completely different than advertised, and had Bob and Ed pick up the slack.

This is Caleb Ecarma, a journalist who covers politics and tech.

- There are trillions of data points, you know,

happening every second.

Every second every time you, you know, buy a book on Amazon,

that’s a data point.

Any time you're interacting with anything online,

that information is almost always being stored somewhere.

Those companies that, you know,

make a lot of money off of having that information need to be able to

quickly pool it and compile it in a way that makes sense and is profitable.

- So is Oracle basically the whole internet?

Kind of.

Or, at least the infrastructure that keeps

a lot of the data on the internet flowing.

And not just for users like you and me, but for big corporate customers too.

Take your bank, for example.

They probably have too many customers with too many transactions

to keep them in one mega giant Excel sheet.

And that's what the relational database is for.

The relational database allows them to keep, like, a million spreadsheets at once,

So all the bank's

customers might be in one table and all your transactions in another.

So when I spend $8 on a latte, the POS system tells Oracle

to put “coffee shop” and “-$8” on my transaction table,

and changes my total money column to zero.

But it's not just banks.

- Today, their clients include United Healthcare, Citibank,

Netflix Amazon

pretty much every, you know, major corporation on, you know, the S&P 500.

They also make a lot of money now from cloud computing,

which is a way for a company like OpenAI that can't afford to buy

all the processing power that they need, to contract that out to another company,

in this case, Oracle, to build these massive data centers and house

all of these GPUs and process all of that computing remotely.

- They are dominant in the Fortune 500.

They managed to find their way into just about everywhere.

- Over the early 2000s, they started acquiring other software companies,

and their business model shifted towards just absorbing all the useful yet

kind of boring behind the scenes tech that runs the internet.

This is Bryan Cantrill, an engineer

who worked at Sun Microsystems, which got bought by Oracle in 2009.

In 2006. I and another engineer

started a, a group inside of Sun

to build a new storage product at Sun.

That product was, was very successful, arguably too successful,

because it brought Oracle in as a customer for the first time in a while.

And Oracle swept in and bought the company,

which I absolutely did not see coming.

- And through buying up their customers and making it hard to get off their software,

they were able to spread like a fungus.

- The big reveal for me working inside of it,

from the outside of Oracle moving in,

I kind of thought this is a great competitor.

And actually it's a company

that hates competition and wants to do everything it possibly can

to asphyxiate competition and then dominate.

And that's how it's done what it's done.

You couldn't go into an airport in the country without seeing

Oracle’s ad campaigns

Oracle runs ten of the ten top banks.

That's it.

- They've also been a contractor for the government since their inception.

- Larry Ellison, his prior occupation at Ampex,

they weren’t able to finish the project.

So they went back to the CIA and continued to work for them,

you know, under that same codename, Project Oracle.

- And that's far from their only government contract.

The U.S. government is one of their best customers.

Soon after their CIA reprise, they got a contract with the Air Force as well.

They have huge contracts with the Department of Defense.

And they have an active contract with the CIA, as well as other agencies,

also for data management and software.

You know, really, I mean, they, they create the plumbing

for all of these data points to travel through.

- So they own data centers, host and manage huge databases for companies

and the government, and even own software that other programs are written on.

That's a lot.

But let's also zoom out for a second to just how the economy of the internet

works in general these days.

- Oracle is very much a proprietary software company.

When you get the Oracle database, you have a license for Oracle.

You buy software, you actually you get a license for software.

He’s a software landlord,

which allows you to, to raise the rent.

- Think about how annoying it is to switch from Spotify to Apple Music.

If you're the government, we're talking about giant databases of things

like everyone's tax information ever, where switching programs

is really hard and expensive, and there are very few options anyway.

- Which has led to some people saying that Oracle doesn't have customers,

it has hostages.

Oracle especially will give away their products

for free or for heavy, heavily discounted.

And as soon as we get our foot in the door, prices are going up,

we can sell our products.

And, and the government will in turn become reliant on Oracle software

because it's very difficult to migrate that over to another system.

- Basically, their carnivorous and litigious nature

plus the rent-based economy of software allowed them to corner the market

and become the only option to corporations and the government.

Back to my favorite Obi-Wan Kenobi impersonator for a second.

What's his vibe?

- You know, he acquired the sixth largest island in Hawaii.

He spent nearly $1 billion on a sailing racing team.

Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of property around the world.

He's been married and divorced many times.

He's gotten quite a bit of plastic surgery done, to maintain,

you know, his perpetual, I guess, youthful look.

Today, he's, he's still, the second-richest person in the world.

- He's been a billionaire since 1993.

Doesn't he do, like, philanthropy or something?

- So I went looking for his philanthropic work, and struggled to find much.

What you found was a medical foundation that he donated a lot of money to,

the, the purpose of that medical foundation was to promote longevity,

very clearly his.

- And remember how he got his start working with the CIA?

It seems to have rubbed off on him, and he's, like, super into surveillance.

Here's what he had to say after Edward Snowden

blew the whistle on the NSA's mass surveillance program.

- The great thing is we live in a democracy.

If we don't like what NSA is doing, we always,

we can just get rid of the government and put in a different government.

- Well clearly,

you're saying whatever the NSA is doing is okay with me.

- It's great.

I wish, you know, yeah— it's great.

It's essential.

- Oracle even makes discount bodycams for cops.

- We completely redesigned body cameras.

The camera's always on, you don’t turn it on and off.

The truth is, we don't really turn it off.

- And really, this guy will take any opportunity

he can to get more surveillance data

and therefore, more money.

- We think we can absolutely lock down schools.

The second someone pulls out a gun, immediately alert.

It recognizes, uses AI cameras to immediately recognize that.

- So his solution to school shootings is one where they're not prevented at all,

and instead we constantly surveil school children

using resource-intensive AI that coincidentally happens

to make him a bunch of money.

This is not only not a solution to the problem,

it adds additional harms that the rest of us have to deal with.

The cops have already pulled a gun on a student

because AI thought his bag of Doritos was a gun.

But back to the TikTok deal for a second.

Remember way back when this whole thing

was about, like, what if China's in our WiFi?

- Mr. Chew, does TikTok access the home WiFi network?

- Is TikTok under the influence of the Chinese Communist Party?

Have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party?

- And it wasn't just China that politicians were worried about.

If you look at the postings on TikTok

and the number of mentions of Palestinians

relative to other social media sites,

it's overwhelmingly so.

- Over the four years that the TikTok ban was definitely going to happen,

and then probably not going to happen, and then definitely happening again,

TikTok started taking precautions.

- So they, you know, came to Oracle

and said, how about we host our user data

for, you know, U.S. users on Oracle servers in Texas.

- So if the data is already here, what is this all about?

Ellison's personal views matter here.

It's not just Oracle's massive data business that landed them American TikTok.

Going back to those congressional hearings, the push to ban

or force the sale of TikTok was always rooted in ideology.

So what's Ellison's ideology behind being so pro-surveillance?

While he's flip-flopped and funded both parties in the U.S.,

perhaps his most firmly held political belief

is his support for the state of Israel.

- I have been to Israel.

I have spent time with the people who govern the state of Israel.

And, you know, I feel a deep emotional connection

to the state of Israel and the Israeli people.

He's given the organization Friends of the IDF over $26 million.

And according to leaked emails, he literally made Marco Rubio run

his speeches by him to make sure they were sufficiently pro-Israel

before giving $5 million to his 2016 presidential run.

Rubio is now secretary of state and central in negotiating the ceasefire.

Larry's also given $350 million to the Tony Blair Institute.

That's more than ten times what he gave to the Friends of the IDF.

TBI is a think tank and consultancy that— surprise—

likes to recruit from McKinsey.

- I think their stated goal is advancing neoliberalism.

- TBI is deeply entwined with Oracle.

Some of the same people sit on both boards, like the organization's

shared non-executive director and Blair's key advisor.

Former staff have even said

that there were hush-hush joint retreats at Ellison properties in the U.S.

Tony Blair Institute, in turn, has sort of become

a sales company for Oracle.

They have all these connections with governments

in Rwanda and Indonesia and other global south countries.

They're essentially, you know, consulting,

offering, you know, altruistic solutions

and then offering Oracle as the remedy for their problems.

And then those countries are then locked into

what are essentially predatory contracts with Oracle.

- Coincidentally, TBI is also notably pro-AI and surveillance.

There's even a page on their website

that reads like an ad for the UK's digital ID program,

which would give the government a ton of info about citizens health,

finances and more.

They want to centralize all government data on citizens into a single library,

And the current ceasefire deal was heavily

influenced by the Tony Blair Institute.

- I would say it's very much in jeopardy.

Tony Blair himself has been approved as taking a leadership role

Their idea would be a digital ID system, total digital surveillance.

As reported by the Israeli outlet N12, The Jerusalem Times and Canary Media,

Blair and Jared Kushner's

plan is for Gaza City to become a tax free city of startups, with server farms

for cloud computing and AI, and a Tesla factory employing cheap, local labor.

So for billionaires like Ellison, money and power create a positive feedback loop:

Make money, buy power,

change the rules so you can make more money,

rinse, and repeat.

It's bigger than just beliefs.

Right now he's using that money and power and exploiting

an internationally recognized genocide to build himself a tax haven in a warzone.

But what does that have to do with TikTok?

Well, it has to do with this

and how Larry's increasing control over the information

that passes through our feeds and into our brains

is being shaped by one man's personal views and political goals.

So while the details are still murky, here's what we know about the deal.

ByteDance will sell 80% of its U.S. operations to

a group of investors that includes Oracle,

along with investment firms Silverlake, Andreessen Horowitz,

and a Blackrock partner MGX.

And according to Trump, it's likely one or two Ellisons,

a Murdoch or two,

Michael Dell and possibly Baron will be given TikTok board seats.

It would break off TikTok's U.S. operations

and allow a consortium of U.S. investors to control

the app within the U.S.

And along with that, Oracle would control its algorithm

and its data and, you know, user security side of everything.

They would pretty much be given the whole system.

- There's also language to suggest

the government may have free rein with our TikTok data.

The deal definitely leaves some privacy wiggle room by saying

“trusted security partners

may also share information with other United States government officials.”

And on top of all this, David Ellison, Larry's son, just appointed himself

the CEO of Paramount/Skydance,

which owns CBS, and is trying to buy Warner Brothers, which owns CNN.

Combining the CBS and CNN audiences under the same control

would give the Ellisons access to about 3.2 million TV viewers

and over 350 monthly online visits.

And this all leads us to a few main issues here.

One, these two deals

would give the Ellisons access to huge swaths of

the American audience,

and add TikTok to the growing list of media outlets

controlled by the tiny club of big tech guys and billionaires

ao hang out withand donate money to Trump.

They've already installed a strong ideological ally, Bari Weiss,

as the head of CBS.

It's pretty blatant crony capitalism,

which is where a super powerful politician

just hands out business deals to his rich buddies.

Two, while I can't say what they will do, or know the truth in Larry's heart,

they are building the framework

for a massively profitable surveillance state at home and abroad,

and setting all that up is a lot harder than pushing the button.

And three, because Oracle already provides the infrastructure

for a lot of government departments and private enterprises,

adding TikTok and government surveillance data to the stuff

we rent space for on his servers

is really just following suit.

But combining it all under one digital umbrella

makes Larry Ellison America's digital landlord.

It locks the government into rental agreements forever,

and gains Oracle more access to a guaranteed source of money:

taxpayer dollars.

- Everything that we have ultimately is due to technological innovation.

To me, technological innovation is so core

to the human experience, and that is our human creativity.

Oracle is not interested in attacking into those larger themes

of humans wielding tools to go to,

to better themselves.

It's like, just not interested.

It's like just pure monetization.

Thanks for watching,

and don’t forget to like, subscribe,

and send us your story ideas at

stories@perfectunion.us