On 27 September 2025, a video circulated of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a meeting with influencers in New York, in which he said that social media platforms are the most important “weapon” for securing the pro-Israel base in the United States.
Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes, described the “TikTok” deal as “the most important acquisition” currently underway. He also referred in his remarks to the X platform, adding, “We need to talk to Elon. He is a friend, not an enemy.”
This came as the US administration was preparing a deal to separate TikTok’s US operations from its parent company in China and open the door to an investor alliance led by Oracle, the company founded by Larry Ellison, one of Israel’s most prominent supporters in Silicon Valley.
The significance of Netanyahu’s words is clear. Whoever holds the keys to the most influential platform in shaping the consciousness of young Americans holds, to a large extent, the ability to shape the narrative that is turning against Israel.
One day earlier, on 25 September, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order supporting an arrangement to sell TikTok’s US arm to an American investment group, following a legislative and judicial process that ended with a Supreme Court ruling on 17 January 2025 backing Trump’s decision: either sell or be banned.
According to official statements, the share of the Chinese parent company “ByteDance” will remain below 20 per cent, while American investors, including Oracle and business magnates such as Larry Ellison, Rupert Murdoch and Michael Dell, will assume control of management and ownership, with the power to oversee the algorithm and the data.
TikTok’s value was estimated at 14 billion dollars, with details to be finalised before next January.
This is what Trump wanted from the beginning, for reasons different from Netanyahu’s. After returning to the White House, the US President invited two tech tycoons to discuss a deal to purchase the social media platform TikTok, as part of a settlement under which the US government would receive up to 50 per cent ownership.
Days later, when Trump was asked who he preferred to lead this acquisition, he replied without hesitation, “I would like Larry to buy it”, in reference to Larry Ellison, who is currently ranked as the second richest man in the world after Elon Musk, with a fortune exceeding 350 billion dollars.
Despite this, Ellison’s name did not circulate in the media to the same extent as the big tech stars such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, even though his wealth has exceeded theirs at more than one point. For that reason, some described him as “the mysterious billionaire who lives in the shadows”, and they attributed this to his absence from social media platforms and his avoidance of direct media spotlight.
However, that image was not entirely accurate. Ellison made headlines in 2012 when he purchased an island in Hawaii almost in its entirety and turned it into a luxurious resort that attracts the wealthy, celebrities and power brokers. At that time, the press focused on the extravagant aspects of his life, such as a fleet of luxury yachts, private jets, a multibillion-dollar real estate empire and multiple marriages.
Yet the most influential side of his trajectory remained largely hidden from view: the man who learned how to turn software and databases into master keys for controlling information worldwide.
In August of last year, Ellison’s business deals began to dominate public discussion and raise concern among American liberals, after he concluded multibillion-dollar deals to buy major film production companies and television networks. This coincided with unprecedented shifts in the American media landscape, linked to the growing influence of the political right in the United States. Some began to speculate that the 81-year-old billionaire seeks to build a media empire through which he can tighten his grip on traditional media outlets in ways that serve the interests of his close friend Donald Trump.
Over the past five decades, however, the billionaire has maintained a steady presence among politicians and powerholders that extends beyond the United States. He enjoyed close ties with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and a friendship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is keen to spend his private holidays on Ellison’s island in Hawaii. Repeated reports also point to Ellison’s intimate relations with US security and intelligence agencies.
All these backgrounds prompt key questions. Who is the man expected to become one of the major media barons in the world? How did he manage, in just a few decades, to amass wealth and influence comparable to that of entire states? And, most importantly, what is his ideology and political orientation that made his company Oracle one of the most prominent backers of the Israeli occupation army, and brought his name into the heart of the debate over TikTok’s future and the global manufacture of public opinion?
The Man Who Controls Everyone’s Data
“Everyone uses Oracle, they just do not know it.”
Gary Bloom – former Vice President of Oracle
In today’s world, technology companies are no longer mere tools. They have become an infrastructure that governs the rhythm of modern life. Greek economist and politician Yanis Varoufakis described this shift as “digital feudalism”, saying that the age of traditional capitalism is giving way to “technological feudalism”, where a small elite monopolises the flow, the information and the interface.
At the heart of this landscape stands the name of Larry Ellison, known as the man who oversees the deep data layers we constantly add to yet never see, whether when we use a phone or a credit card, or even when you visit a hospital, and your health information is entered into its internal systems.
Tech tycoons have tightened their grip on almost every aspect of life, from our digital transactions to the social media platforms we use daily. At the centre of this world, Larry Ellison is known as the man who controls everyone’s data. This is what Gary Bloom, former CEO of Oracle, stated in a Bloomberg documentary about Ellison’s life.
It does not matter where you are in the world. As long as you have a mobile phone or a computer, you are almost certainly using Oracle software.
You may now be wondering what exactly this company does and what product it offers us. To understand this more deeply, we need to go back in time and look at the story of the ambitious young man, Larry Ellison, from the beginning.
Larry Ellison was born on 17 August 1944 to a single mother named Florence Spellman. When he was nine years old, she sent him to live with her relatives Lillian and Louis Ellison so that they could raise him. The Ellisons adopted him, and Larry did not discover he was adopted until he reached young adulthood, when Louis told him the truth one evening over dinner.
Ellison enrolled at the University of Illinois, but after the death of his adoptive mother, he dropped out. Although he joined the University of Chicago the following year, he left again before the year ended, deciding not to complete his university education. In an attempt to start over, Larry packed his belongings and moved to California, where he spent the following years moving between jobs in different technology companies.
The first half of the tech giant’s life may have been harsh, but it seems that this difficult beginning helped shape his personality, determined to win by any means necessary, so that for him, the end justified the means.
In the 1970s, Ellison worked as a junior programmer at a tech start-up called Amdahl, founded by American computer scientist Gene Amdahl in 1970 after he resigned from the famous tech company IBM.
Through his work, the ambitious young man acquired programming experience and basic computer skills. At the time, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was searching for talented programmers capable of designing information systems that could manage massive databases. The agency needed a system that could store enormous amounts of data while allowing that data to be linked and analysed quickly and efficiently. That contract became Ellison’s true launch pad, and from a deal worth no more than 50 thousand dollars, he built his tech empire.
In 1975, the CIA program took on a codename, “Project Oracle”. To work on it, Ellison needed an engineering mind to assist him, so he decided to bring in two of his colleagues, programming and tech geniuses Bob Miner and Edward Oates. In 1977, the three of them formed a partnership to establish a software development laboratory.
Ellison himself was not a programming genius. He was more the public face of the company, distinguished by his exceptional marketing skills. Those who worked with him said he was capable of convincing anyone to buy anything. At that time, Ellison needed a conceptual framework that would enable him to build the massive databases he dreamed of.
He found what he was looking for in a research paper published in 1970 by British computer scientist Edgar Frank Codd titled “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks”. That study laid the foundations for relational databases as we know them today. These systems, then unprecedented, allowed data to be organised into interlinked tables.
By the 1980s, Ellison’s company was ready for an initial public offering. Since it had no product better than its most successful one, Oracle, to present to the markets, Larry chose to give the company the same name that had once been the CIA project. Within a decade, Oracle became a leading company in the field of database management.
Oracle does not sell its products directly to individual customers. Instead, it sells massive databases, data management systems and cloud computing services. This means that, despite its ubiquity, it remains hidden behind a long list of clients. At the same time, however, this allows it full control over the data of billions of users.
Through these colossal data banks, tech tycoons, led by Larry Ellison, have become capable not only of predicting user behaviour, but also of understanding exactly how to influence it. This has granted them enormous economic and political power, sometimes exceeding that of states.
That is not all. In 2022, Oracle acquired 69 per cent of Cerner, a leading company in medical information systems, for 28 billion dollars. Cerner operates many health systems in the Arab world, which means Ellison opened a new market for himself, in both money and data, through this acquisition.
With such power, Oracle might have been expected to be a model of transparency and integrity. Yet in 2024, the company was accused of violating privacy and consumer protection laws and of selling personal data of billions of users to third parties without their consent.
These data reportedly included internet search queries, consumer purchasing patterns and how they used their credit cards. As a result, a series of class action lawsuits was filed against Oracle. The company responded by paying 115 million dollars to settle the suits out of court.
Ellison’s Empire on the Rise
Larry Ellison sees the artificial intelligence boom as his personal good luck charm. He told former British Prime Minister Tony Blair that artificial intelligence surpasses everything human civilisation has witnessed before, including the Industrial Revolution and the invention of electricity.
Indeed, Ellison’s fortune, estimated at 354 billion dollars, surpassed for the first time that of Elon Musk, estimated at 434 billion dollars, on 10 September, according to the British newspaper The Telegraph, after Ellison achieved the highest single-day gain of 88 billion dollars. He briefly held the title of the world’s richest man for a few hours before Elon Musk returned to the top by the close of trading.
Experts attributed the sudden surge in Oracle’s share price to the artificial intelligence boom, which raised hopes for the company due to increasing demand for data centres and AI-related cloud services. This, in turn, boosted Ellison’s wealth, as he owns the largest share of the company at 41 per cent.
Oracle’s CEO Safra Catz recently announced the signing of four multibillion-dollar contracts in the last quarter of this year, with an expected revenue increase that could reach 77 per cent.
This came as US President Donald Trump announced at a press conference the launch of the “Stargate” project, which aims to invest around 500 billion dollars in building artificial intelligence infrastructure in the United States. The project is based on a three-way partnership between Larry Ellison, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company behind the widely known ChatGPT model, and Japanese businessman Masayoshi Son, CEO of SoftBank.
While Ellison prepares to join the club of artificial intelligence barons, he is, on the other hand, spending billions to build a media empire that stretches across the United States, although he manages it under the cover of newly established film production companies owned by his children, Megan and David Ellison.
Megan founded the film production company Annapurna Pictures in 2011, while David launched his media start-up Skydance in 2010, both with backing from their father’s billions.
More striking, however, was Skydance’s acquisition in August of the major film production company Paramount Pictures. Ellison’s son concluded a deal estimated at 8 billion dollars to acquire 50 per cent of the company’s assets, which include well-known television networks such as CBS and MTV.
David later declared his intention to acquire Warner Bros Discovery, one of Hollywood’s giants whose assets include HBO and CNN, in a deal that could exceed 70 billion dollars.
These deals raised concern for media analyst Alex DeGroote, especially after CBS suspended popular host Stephen Colbert following his criticism of a decision by the parent company, Paramount, to settle a lawsuit with US President Donald Trump, which he described as “a big bribe”.
DeGroote said that the removal of late-night hosts critical of Trump coincides with changes in ownership of the media networks themselves. He considered this a parallel move that redraws the US media landscape in ways that serve the influence of the political right, particularly given the close friendship between Ellison and Donald Trump.
These fears intensified after Trump’s recent remarks that the popular video platform TikTok is about to become the property of a consortium of major American companies led by Larry Ellison’s firm and the family of Rupert Murdoch, owners of a vast media empire that includes Fox News and The Wall Street Journal.
If the deal succeeds, Ellison will control a social media platform with more than 150 million users in the United States alone. This would give the American billionaire tremendous power not only over traditional media, but also over multi-generational social platforms.
Will TikTok Fall under Ellison’s Control?
In 2024, former US Secretary of State Antony Blinken sat with American politician and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney to discuss the impact of social media platforms, particularly TikTok, in shaping global public opinion.
Their remarks indicated that their real problem was their inability to monitor and filter the content reaching Americans, especially in the context of the war waged by the Israeli occupation on the Gaza Strip since 7 October 2023. They considered such content harmful to Israel’s public image.
The two concluded that banning the app and preventing Americans from seeing the Israeli atrocities in the Strip would help calm the situation on the American street.
This conclusion supports the view that the real motive behind the fierce campaign led by some members of Congress that culminated in the 2024 TikTok ban law was the momentum the Palestinian cause had gained on the platform. Images and videos emerging from Gaza played a major role in shaping the awareness of a broad segment of young Americans, who saw with their own eyes the horrors and brutal crimes committed by the Israeli occupation army in the besieged and starved Strip. This sharply contradicted the ideal image some Western media outlets tried to project of that army.
TikTok was the only major platform that did not fall under Tel Aviv’s sway and did not wield the censorship scissors to restrict or remove Palestinian content. This stood in contrast to about 90 per cent of social media platforms in the United States, such as Meta, the owner of Facebook, which complied with Israeli demands to modify and remove pro-Palestinian content.
The reason for choosing Larry Ellison in particular to lead the acquisition is no mystery. American journalist Glenn Greenwald commented in a post on X, “Larry Ellison, the billionaire owner of Oracle who donated millions of dollars to the Israeli army, is now going to buy TikTok”, calling it a golden opportunity for Israel after its popularity collapsed in the United States.
In 2014, Ellison was asked about his relationship with Israel in an interview with Israeli journalist Gil Tamari. He answered using the first person plural “we”, saying, “We were a people without a state for more than 2000 years, so we must strongly support the brave men and women of the Israeli army.”
The American billionaire did not hide his Zionist leanings and full support for Israel. He said he had visited the occupied Palestinian territories and boasted of appointing Israeli businesswoman Safra Catz as CEO of Oracle, in which he holds the largest share.
Ellison maintains a close friendship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and is known as a generous donor to the Israeli occupation army. He gave 16.6 million dollars in 2017 alone to the organisation Friends of the Israel Defence Forces.
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) has placed Oracle on the list of companies complicit with the Israeli occupation army in the ongoing genocide against the Gaza Strip since 7 October 2023.
In a detailed two-page report, the movement exposed the activities of the American company and how it cooperated with the occupation army by providing it with artificial intelligence technologies and cloud computing services, thereby enabling it to commit grave human rights violations in the Strip.
The list mentioned a 2021 partnership between Oracle and the Israeli Air Force to launch a secret data engineering project. In 2022, the company hosted Israeli soldiers and software developers affiliated with the occupation army to train them on using Oracle cloud services for military purposes.
At the beginning of the war, Oracle led an initiative in cooperation with Israeli ministries to boost pro-Israel content on social media platforms such as TikTok and X (formerly Twitter). Last year, the company donated nearly half a million dollars to provide medical aid to Israeli soldiers during the war.
Under the latest US-China agreement, media reports indicate that Oracle will be responsible for retraining TikTok’s US algorithm. User data will be stored in a secure cloud environment managed and supervised directly by the American company, under continuous monitoring of the algorithm to “ensure content integrity” – or in reality to ensure the app is free of pro-Palestinian content.
China is unlikely to agree to transfer the parent algorithm’s intellectual property. The more plausible scenario, mentioned in White House explanations and tech media, is licensing a version of the algorithm trained on American data under Oracle’s supervision, with close oversight of how “sensitive” content is evaluated.
This arrangement would impose ceilings and boundaries on expression, turning the TikTok experience in the United States into a distinctly American one, shaped by Israeli-aligned biases that differ from the global experience of other users.
Here, Netanyahu’s remarks return to the heart of the equation. If the platforms are considered a “weapon”, as he said, then controlling content visibility – and not only deleting posts directly – becomes a highly effective tool for shaping public perceptions. If an investor alliance with organic ties to Israel materialises, we will undoubtedly enter a new phase of technological bias.
It is expected that American investors will acquire 80 percent of the US version of TikTok, while the remaining 20 percent will stay with the Chinese parent company ByteDance. Yet the issue goes beyond the simple question of “who buys the app?”. We are witnessing the emergence of a new power that may unify infrastructure (cloud storage and data) with narrative (social platforms and Hollywood studios).
The real test will come in the next few months. What will actually change in the algorithm, in policies and in content? And will American journalism, along with Congress and the regulatory bodies that the United States has long prided itself on, be able to impose standards that prevent TikTok from turning into an isolated authoritarian American bubble dominated by a narrative favoured by Israel and hoped by it to be its lifeline in the near future?
