This Fucking Guy: Larry Ellison

Billionaire Victims Club, Vol. 6

There is a joke that has circulated in Silicon Valley for decades, the kind of joke that survives because it is more accurate than funny: ORACLE, goes the joke, stands for One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison. The man himself is aware of it and has, by various accounts, found it more amusing than troubling, which tells you most of what you need to know about him. He doesn't need to perform persecution. He doesn't need to claim the media misunderstands him. He doesn't need Katechon theology or a Burning Man circuit or a blood transfusion from a twenty-year-old. He just needs Oracle — the actual company, the one named after a CIA intelligence project, the one your hospital runs on, the one your state government's payroll runs on, the one that just took over the TikTok algorithm, the one building the surveillance infrastructure for the AI-powered police state he described out loud at a financial analyst meeting in 2024 with the manner of a man ordering lunch.

That meeting. Let's start there.

"Citizens will be on their best behavior," Ellison told investors at Oracle's September 2024 financial analyst day, "because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on." He also predicted that every police officer would be supervised by AI at all times, that drones would replace police cars in vehicle pursuits ("you just have a drone follow the car — it's very simple in the age of autonomous drones"), and described the whole arrangement as one of the "many opportunities to exploit AI." He said this at a company earnings event, to investors, as a business pitch. Not as a warning. As a product roadmap. The man who built his company on a CIA surveillance contract described the future AI surveillance state he intends to build with Oracle Cloud as the backbone, and the market response was that Oracle's stock ticked upward. You get the tech dystopia you're willing to pay for.

I. The Origin Story the Name Already Told You

In 1977, Larry Ellison was a 33-year-old college dropout — he had attended the University of Illinois for two years and the University of Chicago for one, dropping out of both — working at a California electronics firm called Ampex. He and two colleagues, Bob Miner and Ed Oates, had been doing contract database work for the CIA, on a project the agency had codenamed "Oracle." The project was meant to build a database that could "answer any question about anything" — the classical meaning of an oracle, a source of all knowledge. Ellison found this so fitting that when he and Miner and Oates scraped together $2,000 to start their own company — Software Development Laboratories — and secured a $50,000 CIA contract to keep building the Oracle database, they eventually named the whole company after the project. Not metaphorically. Not as an homage. They named it Oracle because that's what the CIA called the database.

Oracle's own defense and intelligence page states it without embarrassment: "We started with the US Government as our first customer. Today, 1,000+ public sector organizations and 100% of federal cabinet agencies build, modernize, and innovate with Oracle." Oracle's first commercially sold product was Oracle Version 2 — there was no Version 1, because Ellison decided customers would be more comfortable buying something that appeared to have already gone through a first version. The CIA contract gave Oracle the credibility that no startup could otherwise acquire. The first commercially deployed version of Oracle ran at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base on Defense Department computers.

So the luck audit here is almost too easy: the man who founded Silicon Valley's most dominant enterprise software company did so with a CIA contract, named the company after it, and then spent the next fifty years selling the resulting product to governments, intelligence agencies, corporations, and hospitals worldwide. He didn't disrupt a market. He started as a government contractor, named the company after the contract, and grew it into the infrastructure layer of American institutional life. The self-made disruptor who owns most of a Hawaiian island launched as an intelligence community vendor. The rest is database licensing.

II. The Surveillance Empire

That CIA origin is not a historical footnote. It is a continuous operating logic.

In 2022, a federal class action lawsuit accused Oracle of assembling and selling detailed surveillance dossiers on approximately five billion people — more than half the human population — through a web of data broker subsidiaries including BlueKai, Datalogix, AddThis, and Crosswise. The suit alleged Oracle tracked people's locations, purchasing behavior, political views, income, and personal relationships without their knowledge or consent, building profiles that were then sold to advertisers, insurance companies, and government agencies. Oracle settled for $115 million in 2024. Databases don't disappear after a $115 million fine when the underlying business model is still operational, but the settlement resolved the lawsuit. Twenty-five percent of American hospitals now run on Oracle Health, formerly Cerner, acquired in 2022 for $28.3 billion. The Veterans Affairs medical system runs on Oracle. Department of Defense medical records run on Oracle. One hundred percent of federal cabinet agencies run on Oracle.

Now add the TikTok layer. When the Trump administration finalized its TikTok divestiture deal in January 2026, Oracle emerged as a 15% stakeholder in the new TikTok U.S. joint venture — and, more importantly, as the entity responsible for retraining, testing, and updating TikTok's content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data. The company that built surveillance dossiers on five billion people now oversees the algorithm deciding what 170 million Americans see on their phones. Oracle will host all U.S. TikTok user data. One of Trump's advisers called Ellison "the shadow president of the United States." Shortly after the TikTok deal was finalized, reports surfaced of TikTok suppressing content critical of ICE immigration operations and filtering certain terms from search. TikTok denied systematic censorship. Oracle said nothing publicly. The arrangement was described by the administration as a national security solution.

There is also Oracle's history in China, which is less discussed than it should be. Oracle provided customer relationship management and HR software to Chinese state security and police agencies, including, according to reporting, entities operating in Xinjiang during the Uyghur detention campaign. Oracle has disputed the characterizations of this reporting and eventually withdrew from China's public security market in 2022. The withdrawal came after the reporting, not before.

III. The House of Ellison

In September 2025, Oracle's stock price briefly made Ellison the wealthiest person on Earth, with an estimated net worth of $393 billion. By early 2026, that figure had declined to approximately $201 billion — a paper loss of roughly $190 billion in five months, which is a number that requires a moment to process even in a series about obscene wealth. This is not a collapse; Ellison remains enormously, dynastic-level rich. But the Oracle stock boom that made him momentarily the world's richest man was driven by AI infrastructure optimism that has since been subjected to the same market skepticism being applied to the entire sector, and the correction has been swift.

Meanwhile, the House of Ellison has been expanding aggressively into media with financing structures that a March 2026 Slate investigation described as "much, much shakier than they're letting on." Ellison's son David leads Paramount Skydance, which acquired Paramount Global in 2025 — putting CBS, MTV, BET, Nickelodeon, Paramount+, and Pluto TV under Ellison family control. One of their first major editorial decisions was hiring Bari Weiss to run CBS News, a choice whose reception can be charitably described as divisive and whose coverage has been described less charitably by former CBS journalists as "fawning" toward the Trump administration. David Ellison has also won a bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, which would add CNN and Warner's entire media library to the family's holdings. The debt load across these acquisitions is financed in significant part by Gulf sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar — countries that have lately been disrupted by the regional fallout from the ongoing US-Iran conflict. Iranian leaders have explicitly named Oracle's Middle East data centers as potential military targets. The Gulf states are reconsidering their investment commitments. The House of Ellison, in other words, has extended itself financially on the assumption that Gulf sovereign money stays committed, while the geopolitical context for that commitment is actively deteriorating.

IV. The Man Himself

Larry Ellison is 81 years old. He was born in New York City to an unmarried 19-year-old mother, given up for adoption at nine months, raised by his mother's aunt and uncle in a modest South Side Chicago apartment. His adoptive father, a government civil servant who had lost his real estate business in the Depression, reportedly told Ellison he would amount to nothing. He has been married and divorced four times: Adda Quinn (divorced 1974), Nancy Wheeler (divorced 1978, a marriage that lasted approximately as long as his first Oracle contract), Barbara Boothe (divorced 1987, with whom he has two children, including David), and Melanie Craft, a romance novelist (divorced 2010). He won the America's Cup in 2013 with Oracle Team USA, coming back from an 8-1 deficit in the best-of-17 series to win 9-8, in a victory that has since been somewhat complicated by the fact that the team was found to have illegally placed lead weights in their catamarans, incurring a two-point penalty and a $250,000 fine. He won despite the cheating penalty, then won again in 2013 despite starting with a handicap caused by cheating. This is, if you squint, a reasonable metaphor for his career.

He owns 98% of Lānaʻi, the sixth-largest Hawaiian island, purchased in 2012, on which he has built hotels, a Four Seasons, solar and water infrastructure, and a compound whose dimensions are not made public. He owns multiple superyachts. He owns a fleet of aircraft including a MiG-29, which he is licensed to fly. He sat alongside Trump, Sam Altman, and SoftBank's Masayoshi Son at the White House in January 2025 to announce the Stargate AI infrastructure initiative — a $500 billion AI data center build-out, with Oracle as a central participant. He is on the PCAST advisory council. He is, by one Trump adviser's description, the shadow president of the United States.

V. The Close

What makes Ellison different from everyone else in this series is the absence of the persecution routine. He doesn't need it. He was never going to be the underdog, never going to pretend the system was unfair to him, because he never had any interest in that framing. He started by getting a CIA contract, named his company after the CIA contract, built the surveillance infrastructure of American institutional life, briefly became the world's richest person, lost $190 billion on paper in five months without visible distress, is now overseeing TikTok's algorithm from one of his Hawaiian island compounds, and has a son assembling a Trump-aligned media empire from Paramount to CNN. He said out loud — at a financial analyst day, to investors — that citizens should be on their best behavior because they are constantly being recorded and reported on. And the market responded by briefly making him the richest man alive.

The acronym floating around Silicon Valley for fifty years turns out not to be a joke at all. It's an org chart. Oracle: One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison, who started with a CIA contract, named the company after the contract, and spent half a century building the infrastructure for the surveillance state he described without apology in 2024. The system isn't persecuting him. He built the system.

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