Larry Ellison may have hijacked every power lane in America

Larry Ellison seems to have hijacked every power lane in America (tech, politics, and Hollywood) all at once. The 81-year-old billionaire, Oracle’s co-founder and current CTO, became the richest person in the world for a day last week after Oracle shares exploded on the back of massive AI contracts.

The key driver? A huge new partnership with OpenAI, plus over $455 billion in signed contracts tied to cloud and artificial intelligence.

That earnings report triggered Oracle’s biggest single-day gain since 1992. Larry, who owns around 40% of the company, shot up to a net worth of $363 billion, briefly overtaking Elon Musk, as Cryptopolitan previously reported.

And he’s doing it all with Donald Trump’s backing. At a White House event in January, Trump appeared with Larry to announce Stargate, a $500 billion AI data center venture between Oracle, OpenAI, and SoftBank. Larry stood on stage next to Trump, Sam Altman, and Masayoshi Son.

Larry told former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair at a Dubai summit in February, “AI is a much bigger deal than the Industrial Revolution, electricity and everything that’s come before.”

Larry moves into media, Trump wants him to buy TikTok

Right after that Oracle earnings bombshell, The Wall Street Journal reported the Ellison family is now preparing a majority-cash bid for Warner Bros. Discovery.

That would combine Paramount Global, already taken over by Larry’s son David Ellison, with another entertainment giant, creating a new super-conglomerate controlling Paramount+, HBO Max, and two of Hollywood’s biggest studios.

David is running Skydance Media, which merged with Paramount to form this new powerhouse. But it’s Larry who controls the entities that own it. The same week the Warner Bros. news leaked, it also came out that David is pursuing an acquisition of the Free Press, the digital news site founded by Bari Weiss.

Talks are underway to give Bari a leading editorial role at CBS News, which Skydance now owns under its new setup. David has also installed Trump ally Kenneth Weinstein as CBS News ombudsman, tightening his grip on the editorial direction.

Trump himself called David “a great man” after reaching a $16 million legal settlement with CBS over a “60 Minutes” episode. While Larry was once a supporter of Bill Clinton, he now sits comfortably in Trump’s orbit. In 2020, he even hosted a fundraiser for Trump at his estate, but didn’t show up personally.

The TikTok angle is just as loud. Larry’s been circling TikTok since 2020, when Trump tried to force its Chinese parent ByteDance to sell off U.S. operations. Biden signed a TikTok ban in 2024, but Trump returned to office and paused enforcement while trade talks with China continued.

At the White House event in January, Trump was asked about Elon buying TikTok. He said, “I’d be fine with that… I’d like Larry to buy it, too.”

Larry stays in control at Oracle and builds his personal empire

Even after handing over the CEO title, Larry’s still running things. People inside Oracle say he leads weekly development meetings and keeps a tight partnership with CEO Safra Catz.

In 2024, it bought health-data company Cerner for $28.3 billion, and Larry used that to explain his long-term strategy. “Healthcare was the only big problem Elon left us,” he said at the Oracle Health Summit.

Larry doesn’t hide his admiration for Elon Musk, often calling him an influence. When Elon needed investors for the $44 billion Twitter buyout, Larry texted him offering “a billion… or whatever you recommend.”

His Ellison Institute of Technology is directly inspired by Elon’s company network. The institute is working with Oxford University researchers using Oracle tech to find profitable solutions for climate change, food security, and more.

Larry’s obsession with control goes back decades, as Cryptopolitan detailed in an Op-ed by the same author. In 2000, during Microsoft’s antitrust scandal, he admitted to hiring investigators to dig into Microsoft’s ties to lobbyists and politicians. He called it his “civic duty.”

In the early 2000s, Larry got sued by shareholders after dumping $900 million in Oracle stock before earnings missed. He didn’t admit guilt but settled and donated $100 million to charity.

Larry started all this after dropping out of college twice, getting a job at Ampex, and working on a CIA database project named “Oracle.” He liked the name so much, he used it for his own startup in 1977. Oracle went public in 1986, and by the ’90s, he was a billionaire.

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