The Oracle of Surveillance: How Larry Ellison Built America's Invisible Empire
Part 0: The Overview. A multi-part investigation into the most powerful man almost nobody talks about.
Five billion people.
That's how many human beings Oracle Corporation claimed to have detailed dossiers on, and all by 2020. Not profiles, not user accounts, not usernames, but full dossiers. We're talking names, addresses, browsing histories, purchase records, health data, location tracking, and even your political preferences. The digital exhaust of modern life, all collected, analyzed, and monetized.
On a planet of eight billion souls, Larry Ellison's machine had files on five billion of them, and that estimate was over half a decade ago.
Now he owns 15% of TikTok, a quarter of America's hospital records run on his systems, and his cloud hosts classified Pentagon secrets, his son just bought CBS News, Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon, MTV, and Showtime, and at the time of writing, we have now received breaking news that Ellison's son's Skydance-Paramount has won the bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, beating out Netflix for CNN, HBO, and the entire Warner Bros. film library. All while Ellison is simultaneously building a $500 billion AI system, at the behest of the White House.
This isn't the story of another tech billionaire. This is the story of how surveillance became infrastructure, how one man built an empire that touches every layer of human activity, and why almost nobody is paying attention.
Except for us over here at The Red String Wire. We followed the money. We mapped the power. And we've wired the threads.
The CIA's Database Company
Every empire has an origin myth, and while most are sanitized, Oracle's isn't…it has simply been forgotten.
In 1977, a 33-year-old college dropout named Larry Ellison was working at the consulting firm Ampex when the CIA came calling. The agency had a project, code-named "Project Oracle," to build a special relational database, and the previous contract had just lapsed. Ellison and his colleague Robert Miner convinced the CIA to let them pick it up for $50,000.
They founded a company called Software Development Laboratories. Then Relational Software Incorporated. Then, finally, they named it after the thing that made them: Oracle Systems Corporation. Named directly after the CIA project.
The CIA was their first customer.
This isn't speculation buried in classified documents. Oracle's own defense and intelligence page states it plainly: "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."
One. Hundred. Percent. Of federal cabinet agencies.
The company was born from an intelligence agency's need to organize information about people, and 49 years later, it has never stopped doing exactly that. It just expanded the definition of "information" to include everything about everyone…
The Ideology
Most tech billionaires at least pay lip service to privacy and civil liberties, even as their companies hoover up user data. Ellison skips the pretense, and sees surveillance as a feature, not a bug.
Three weeks after September 11, 2001, while America was still processing the attack, Ellison called for a national identification card with biometric identifiers, thumbprints, iris scans, all linked to a centralized database merging Social Security records, law enforcement databases, and other government data. He offered to donate Oracle's software, for free.
When the ACLU pushed back and Congress eventually banned national ID systems in 2005, Ellison didn't give up. He pivoted. If the US wouldn't let him build a biometric database, he'd find other ways to collect the same information, and other countries that would.
By September 2024, during Oracle's Financial Analyst Meeting, the world's second-richest man was ready to say the quiet part out loud:
"Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there's a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on."
He also predicted AI-powered drones replacing police cars:
"You just have a drone follow the car. It's very simple in the age of autonomous drones."
This wasn't a slip. It wasn't taken out of context. It was a billionaire whose company was literally founded on a CIA database contract, who bought his way into tracking data on five billion people, who now owns a quarter of America's hospital records, telling investors that the future is total surveillance.
And he's excited about it.
The through-line is 23 years long, and perfectly straight. From volunteering to build the government a biometric database in 2001 to promising investors an AI panopticon in 2024.
The Empire
So what does the Ellison family touch, either directly or through Oracle, you ask?
Government and Intelligence. Every federal cabinet agency runs on Oracle infrastructure, and has since 1977. Top Secret/SCI cloud environments for the Defense Department and Intelligence Community. A $9 billion JWCC military cloud contract. A $222.53 million US Army cloud deal in 2025. An $88 million Air Force contract for Top Secret workloads in 2026.
Your Health. 25% of American hospitals run on Oracle Health, formerly Cerner, acquired for $28.3 billion. The entire Veterans Affairs medical system. Department of Defense medical records.
Your Data. Five billion dossiers compiled through BlueKai, Datalogix, AddThis, and Crosswise. The apparatus was "shut down" after a $115 million settlement in 2024, but databases don't disappear after a fine that's akin to a slap on the wrist.
Your Media. CBS News, Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon, MTV, Showtime, UFC broadcast rights, all now owned through Larry Ellison's son David Ellison's Skydance acquisition. Fifteen percent of TikTok's US entity, with 170 million American users. And in February 2026, Skydance-Paramount won the bidding war for all of Warner Bros. Discovery, beating Netflix. That's CNN, HBO, and the entire Warner Bros. film library, all now under one family's umbrella.
Your Future. Stargate LLC, a $100 to $500 billion AI infrastructure project, announced by the Trump administration. A strategic partnership with Palantir for military and intelligence AI systems. $11 million in annual federal lobbying, with former lawmakers on the payroll.
And overseas? Marketing surveillance tools to Chinese police, including in Xinjiang, during what the US State Department calls a genocide. Building biometric ID systems for the UK, the same systems Congress banned domestically. Personal ties between Oracle's CEO and Benjamin Netanyahu. And underground data centers in Israel.
This is not a company. It's an infrastructure layer for modern life, that happens to be controlled by one man and his family.
The Gap Between Attention and Power
If one family holds so much power, why are they not household names like the other upper echelon in the US?
Elon Musk gets the congressional hearings. Mark Zuckerberg gets the regulatory scrutiny. And Larry Ellison gets the big, dark, shadow contracts.
Ellison doesn't need to buy Twitter. He has TikTok and CNN. He doesn't need to lobby against AI regulation, as he's building the government's entire AI infrastructure. He doesn't need to fight privacy laws, as he already has the data.
WIRED called him "a shadow president in Donald Trump's America," operating with "more stealth than Musk" in shaping the administration's technology agenda.
Traditional media focuses on the loud billionaires. The ones who buy social media platforms and launch rockets and get into Twitter feuds. They miss the quiet ones, who buy the systems that actually run society.
They follow the noise. We follow the money.
The concentration of data, infrastructure, defense contracts, media ownership, social media control, and political access in a single family, with a documented 49-year pattern of building surveillance tools for governments including authoritarian ones, represents a level of power concentration that should concern anyone who cares about how the future gets built.
The Series
This overview is a map, and over the coming days and weeks, we'll be walking through every inch of it.
Part 1: The Database That Named Itself. How a CIA side project became the foundation of a surveillance empire.
Part 2: The Man Behind the Machine. Larry Ellison's ideology, from national ID cards to AI-powered drone policing.
Part 3: The Acquisition Machine. How Oracle assembled the most comprehensive data pipeline in corporate history, one hostile takeover at a time.
Part 4: Five Billion Files. Inside Oracle's consumer surveillance apparatus. What they collected, how they got caught, and where the data went.
Part 5: The Government Pipeline. Top Secret clearances, $9 billion contracts, and the revolving door between Oracle and the Pentagon.
Part 6: The China File. Oracle's surveillance tools in the hands of Chinese police. In Xinjiang. During a genocide.
Part 7: The Political Bridge. Safra Catz, $11 million in lobbying, and the quiet art of influence without fingerprints.
Part 8: The Media Empire. CBS, TikTok, CNN. How one family is assembling control over what Americans see and hear.
Part 9: Stargate and The Network. $500 billion in AI infrastructure, a partnership with Palantir, and the convergence of surveillance and artificial intelligence.
Each part is sourced. Each claim is documented. And wherever the Red Threads lead, we will follow.
The Red Thread
The red string connects Larry Ellison to Peter Thiel, to the intelligence agencies, to the defense contractors, to the political donors, to the media owners. It's the same network, the same people, the same money, all flowing through different vessels toward the same end: control, through information.
You don't have an Oracle account. You've never bought Oracle stock. You probably couldn't name three Oracle products.
But Oracle knows you.
When you went to the hospital, your records went into Oracle's database. When you scrolled TikTok, your engagement patterns fed Oracle's algorithms. When your employer runs payroll through PeopleSoft, Oracle processes your salary. When you interact with government services running on Oracle infrastructure, the company founded on a CIA contract handles your information.
The surveillance state wasn't imposed by government decree. It was built through procurement. One contract at a time. One acquisition at a time. One database at a time.
Information is the opposite of helplessness.
We’ll see you all at the next drop, but until then always remember to Follow The Red Threads.
Sources
Every claim is sourced. Feel free to check our work.