MAGA Inc.: Oracle
Larry Ellison. Photo: Orange Photography. Used under Creative Commons license.
Project Oracle, the inspiration for the company that Larry Ellison co-founded, was a contract issued by the Central Intelligence Agency back in 1975 to build a system for the mass storage of digital data. Ellison, who worked on the CIA contract, soon realized the commercial possibilities of using databases to keep track of different kinds of data, so he helped set up a company named Oracle in Santa Clara, California, in 1977 to sell the first relational database management system.
(Click here for the table of contents of MAGA Inc.: A Guide to Trump's World of Crypto Czars, Tech Titans and Prison Profiteers.)
Over the following five decades, the company has seen its revenues grow exponentially as the demand to safely store and analyze digital information has exploded over the years, notably for the “cloud” – the massive databases used to store data on offsite data centers.
“The Oracle database is used to keep track of basically everything,” Ellison told the New York Times in 2002. “The information about your banks, your checking balance, your savings balance, is stored in an Oracle database. Your airline reservation is stored in an Oracle database. What books you bought on Amazon is stored in an Oracle database. Your profile on Yahoo! is stored in an Oracle database.”
Following the September 11th, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, Ellison offered to donate Oracle software to create a national tracking system to identify potential terrorists for the U.S. government.
Fast forward to today and Ellison is now selling the idea that data, with the assistance of AI, to can help keep tabs on all people at all times with the help of his company’s software. “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on,” Ellison told Oracle investors in September 2024. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report the problem and report it to the appropriate person.”
In the intervening years, Ellison has grown staggeringly rich (he was briefly the world’s wealthiest man) and has become a playboy, racing yachts, buying expensive cars and building lavish homes for himself. He bought up 98 percent of Lanai, one of Hawaii’s islands, which he has essentially turned into a private resort, forcing many local businesses to close and making it unaffordable for anyone else to live there.
In 2020, he began to back Donald Trump, beginning with taking part in a conference call to challenge Joe Biden’s victory. After Trump took power again in 2025, he has started to explore taking control of major media outlets.
In July 2025, he bankrolled his son to take control of Paramount studios and CBS television, with the explicit blessing of Donald Trump, and in January 2026, he announced that he would take a 15 percent stake in TikTok, one of the world’s leading social media platforms, in a deal openly orchestrated with the help of the Trump administration. (Days after Oracle bought a stake in TikTok, the platform was accused of suppressing material critical of the Trump administration.)
The Ellison family business has now set its sights on acquiring CNN News, which is currently owned by the mass media and entertainment conglomerate Warner Brothers. Paramount announced a hostile takeover bid for Warner in 2025, which has also been effectively backed by Donald Trump.
Masayoshi Son Masayoshi Son is the money man of the three Big Tech entrepreneurs who joined Trump the day after he was inaugurated in 2025. Although Son is virtually unknown in the U.S., he is well known in Silicon Valley because of SoftBank, the Japanese investment bank that he founded and headed up for 45 years. A billionaire many times over, he has backed some of the most successful online ventures as well as many others that have gone bust. Among his successes are AliBaba in China (similar to Amazon, where his initial US$20 million investment in 1999 was worth US$60 billion when it went public in 2014) and Yahoo Japan, the email company. On the other hand, SoftBank also funded WeWork, an office sharing platform, which went from a high of US$47 billion in 2019 to bankruptcy in 2023. According to Lionel Barber, author of “Gambling Man: The Secret Story of the World's Greatest Disruptor, Masayoshi Son,” Son learned how to make money in Japan from his father who ran pachinko (slot machine) parlors. For example, Son’s father ran a gambling parlor called The Golden Lion. "He needed to have very high turnover, lots of people [so] he fixed the machines, he fixed the pins, so everybody would win,” Barber told WBUR radio. This had the impact of quickly expanding his customer base. Once he had their attention, the older Son returned to business-as-usual. “This is how Masa has pursued his career. He's delighted in running up big loss leading companies in order to get the bigger prize. The bigger market share, later,” said Barber. “Essentially flood the zone. He'd wipe out the competition just by throwing money.” Barber also said that Son likes to talk big and isn’t afraid to capitalize on other people’s ideas – indeed, he said that Son made his first million by "borrowing" an invention from a professor at the University of California at Berkeley named Forrest Mozer. A decade ago, Son borrowed US$45 billion from the government of Saudi Arabia for his SoftBank Vision Fund to invest in new start-ups. He promised to make them a seven percent return, which was largely a flop because of investments in WeWork. |
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