Billionaire surveillance enthusiast set to acquire TikTok's US operations

Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, accompanied by President Trump in the White House on January 21, 2025. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

In the near future, Larry Ellison, an 81-year-old tech oligarch, could be in control of one of the world's most powerful media empires.

In August, Skydance Media, a firm funded by Ellison and led by his son David, completed an $8 billion merger with Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS. The Ellisons' media ambitions have only grown since then. Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that the company now known as Paramount Skydance was preparing a bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN, HBO, and a range of other brands.

Apart from traditional media and streaming, the elder Ellison also has eyes set on TikTok, the massive social media app owned by a company based in China. Last week, Donald Trump announced that Ellison would be among the group of American billionaires allowed to acquire TikTok's domestic operations to prevent the app from being banned in the U.S. "You know, they're very well-known people," Trump said in a Fox News interview on Sunday while discussing who would be involved in a TikTok deal. "And Larry Ellison is one of them. He’s involved. He’s a great guy."

Ellison is less known than some of his younger Silicon Valley peers, like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. However, his net worth has skyrocketed amid the artificial intelligence boom. The vast majority of his riches come from his 40% stake in Oracle, the database software and cloud computing firm he cofounded in 1977 and has helped lead since. Earlier this month, a surge in Oracle's stock lifted Ellison's wealth past Musk, temporarily making him the wealthiest person in the world with a net worth of $383.2 billion.

Ellison has spent much of this century indulging in his riches, including spending an estimated $875 million on a sailing match racing team, $200 million on a California estate, and $300 million to acquire 98% of the sixth-largest island in Hawaii.

But Ellison has larger ambitions, among them the belief that humanity would greatly benefit from a surveillance society governed by an all-seeing system of artificial intelligence. "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on," he said during a question-and-answer session with Oracle investors last year. "It’s unimpeachable."

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This article was originally published in Oligarch Watch, Popular Information’s sister publication.

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Ellison's enthusiasm for AI is self-serving. A society oriented around centralized databases and immense computing demands would mean more work for Oracle. But Ellison has framed that vision as altruistic. "I think this will make for a happier citizenry," he said in February, referring to the creation of a single massive database that an AI system could easily scan.

Ellison has a lengthy history of advocating for government surveillance. During a 2014 speech, he criticized NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, suggesting that no one had been "wrongly injured" by the agency's domestic spying operations. "By sharing your personal data, there are enormous benefits both to you individually and to the society as a whole," he added at the time. (His interest in databases stems from the early years of his tech career, when he worked on a CIA database project codenamed "Oracle" — which inspired the name of the company Ellison later founded.)

As for Ellison's effort to acquire vast media holdings, his carefully managed relationship with Trump has proven beneficial. Ellison for years has supported Republicans, although he often backed what he described as "centrist" politicians like Mitt Romney in 2012 and Marco Rubio in 2016. He did not hold a fundraiser for Trump until early 2020, which resulted in some Oracle employees staging a walkout. Ellison remained equivocal. "I said President Trump could use the property. I was not here," he said in April 2020, referring to Trump's use of his Rancho Mirage, California, retreat to hold the fundraiser. "We only have one president at a time," he added. "I don't think he's the devil — I support him and want him to do well."

Still, his standing with the then-first-term president was sufficient enough for Trump to greenlight Ellison taking part in a deal to buy TikTok's U.S. operations. That deal, which also involved Walmart, fell through. But ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese owner, attempted to quiet scrutiny in Washington by signing an agreement in the fall of 2020 to host the data of American TikTok users on Oracle servers.

Now, five years later, Ellison has been included in the proposed consortium to purchase 80% of TikTok's U.S. operations, as required by a law passed by Congress and signed by Joe Biden last year. According to Trump, Fox Corp. chief executive Lachlan Murdoch will also be involved in the consortium, along with Michael Dell, the chief executive of Dell Technologies, and the pro-Trump venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

The deal has been months in the making. In January, shortly after Trump began his second term, the president named Ellison as one of his preferred TikTok buyers. "I'd like Larry to buy it," Trump said, nodding at Ellison, who was visiting the White House with OpenAI's Sam Altman to promote a $500 billion project to build AI infrastructure in the U.S. that has yet to materialize.

As part of his role in spinning off TikTok's U.S. operations, Ellison will gain access to a massive trove of data delineating the political views, consumption habits, and social connections of tens of millions of Americans who use the app. "[TikTok's] data and privacy will be led by one of America's greatest tech companies, Oracle," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News over the weekend. "And the algorithm will also be controlled by America as well."

Ellison has already played a role in the conservative overhaul of one social media platform. In 2022, he invested $1 billion in Musk's purchase of Twitter, simply because he thought the takeover "would be lots of fun." Twitter, now X, has since become a sump of right-wing propaganda and Musk's personal megaphone.

There have been snags in Ellison's insatiable quest for data. In 2022, Oracle agreed to settle a class action lawsuit accusing the company of secretly assembling "digital dossiers" on millions of people and selling them to third parties. Oracle denied wrongdoing but agreed to a $115 million negotiated settlement last year.