Oracle has emerged as one of the most aggressive...

Editor's note: ...builders of AI infrastructure in the technology industry, channeling tens of billions of dollars into vast data center facilities packed with Nvidia GPUs to supply the raw computing power demanded by leading AI labs and companies. Through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure the company is constructing multi-gigawatt facilities across the US and abroad, securing landmark multi-year contracts including a reported $300 billion agreement with OpenAI that anchors the Stargate initiative (a $500 billion project to build out large scale data centers), while simultaneously embedding advanced AI capabilities directly into its flagship databases and enterprise applications. This dual strategy of hyper-scale capacity and software intelligence has transformed Oracle from a traditional database giant into a critical enabler of the current AI boom, even as the scale of its capital spending tests investor confidence in the race to meet insatiable demand for training and inference power.

The Rise of the Ellison Empire

July 24, 2026 | By Martin Armstrong

There was a time when America's industrial titans built railroads, steel mills, and oil companies. Today, influence is measured in data, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, media, and information. Few families illustrate that transformation better than the Ellisons.

Larry Ellison built Oracle from a small software company into one of the world’s largest technology firms. His background and rags-to-riches story are quite interesting. Today Oracle is one of the dominant providers of enterprise databases and cloud infrastructure, serving governments, financial institutions, healthcare providers, defense contractors, and many of the world’s largest corporations. Oracle’s software touches enormous portions of the global economy. When governments collect taxes, hospitals manage patient records, banks process transactions, or corporations analyze data, Oracle systems are often operating behind the scenes. [Editor's note: Oracle's first contract was with the CIA for $50,000.]

Larry Ellison's personal fortune has placed him among the wealthiest individuals in the world for decades. His influence extends well beyond technology. He has invested billions in real estate, owns nearly all of the Hawaiian island of Lanai, has backed medical research, invested heavily in artificial intelligence, and has maintained relationships with political and business leaders from both parties. The TikTok debacle this year was solved when the power was handed over to Ellison's conglomerate. The sheer data this family has access to is staggering. Wealth at that level naturally provides access to decision makers across government and industry.

Then we come to his son, David Ellison, who founded Skydance Media in 2010. The company produced or co-produced major franchises including Mission: Impossible, Top Gun: Maverick, and Star Trek, before expanding into television, animation, gaming, and streaming. This was never merely a wealthy man's son playing Hollywood producer. Skydance became the vehicle through which the Ellison family entered the machinery of American culture.

The Skydance takeover of Paramount for $8 billion brought CBS, CBS News, Paramount Pictures, Paramount+, Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy Central, BET, Showtime, and decades of film and television rights into the Ellison orbit. The father built an empire around the storage and processing of information. The son moved into the business of selecting, packaging, and distributing information to the public. That combination should concern everyone, regardless of politics. Oracle occupies a critical position within the technological infrastructure used by governments and corporations, while Paramount reaches millions of people through news, entertainment, sports, children's programming, and streaming. One side of the family empire helps manage the data. The other side can help shape the narrative.

This is how oligarchies emerge in the modern world. They do not need to abolish elections or openly seize control of government. They acquire the infrastructure, the platforms, the studios, the databases, and the channels through which society communicates. Politicians then come begging for access, favorable coverage, campaign support, or technological assistance.

I have written extensively about the growing surveillance state because data is the new instrument of political control. Oracle does not merely sell office software; its databases and cloud systems sit beneath governments, banks, hospitals, corporations, and defense institutions, processing information on countless individuals. This does not mean Larry Ellison personally searches through anyone's private records, but it does mean his empire occupies a powerful position within the infrastructure where that information is stored and managed. Governments no longer need to kick down every door when they can pressure a handful of technology companies to surrender the data voluntarily or obtain it through the courts. Now his son controls a media empire capable of influencing what millions of Americans see, hear, and believe about that very system. The father's world helps store the information while the son's world can shape the public narrative, and anyone who cannot see the danger in combining those two forms of power is refusing to understand how a modern surveillance state is constructed.

Some will say there is no evidence that the Ellisons have committed any crime merely by owning these businesses. That misses the entire point. A concentration of power does not become dangerous only after somebody is convicted. The problem is creating a structure in which a handful of unelected families can exercise more economic, technological, and cultural influence than entire governments. America once feared monopolies because people understood that concentrated economic power eventually becomes political power.

The Ellisons did not invent this system, but they have become one of its clearest examples. Larry Ellison built the technological empire. David Ellison extended the family's reach into media and culture. When one family can occupy both the infrastructure of information and the institutions that distribute it, we are no longer discussing ordinary entrepreneurial success. We are looking at the architecture of modern power.

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Editor's note: Considering that artificial intelligence is Oracle's (and Oracle's $300 billion agreement with OpenAI and a $7 billion deal with the Pentagon) primary direction was mentioned in the Armstrong Economics piece above, it is worth noting Ben Goertzel views AI's current direction as a high-profile example of the centralized, proprietary approach to advanced AI that he considers fundamentally risky and "without moral agency." He argues that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is too consequential to be developed and controlled by a handful of venture-backed companies, this includes Oracle, warning that closed systems concentrate power in ways that could lock in corporate or geopolitical dominance rather than serve broad human benefit. In contrast to OpenAI's model of tightly held models and guarded research, Goertzel champions fully open-source AGI architectures running on decentralized networks (or "open-weight" systems appears to be what China is striving for), believing this is the only practical safeguard against an AI arms race, monopolistic capture, and the possibility that a small group of labs dictates the trajectory of super-intelligent systems. His recent views are worth listening to:

 

The hacking story Ben Goertzel discusses above concerning AI having no "moral agency" continues here. Think about that for a second: AI has no moral agency and Oracle that is building a "closed" AI structure has a $7 billion contract with the Pentagon. Wtf can't go wrong now? When AI is fully weaponized does it need "moral agency?

Now can you understand why the US is weaponizing AI as it turns into an "arms race"?

Quote of the day by Vladimir Putin on AI: 'Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world' — an outlook on geopolitical dominance