Welcome to Gilded Age 2.0

Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder of Oracle and (as of this writing) the world’s third-richest person, famously once said that “death has never made any sense to me. How can a person be there and then just vanish, just not be there?” At the age of 81, Ellison, less-known than parallel figures like Elon Musk, is living up to this denial of mortality, as he continues to work tirelessly to dominate the tech sector and the media industry all at once, utterly transforming the sociocultural and political landscape in his image. 

A classic college dropout in the tech business world, Ellison hit his fortune as Oracle became a top database software firm in the 1980s and 90s, and today, alongside still sitting as chairman and chief technology officer at Oracle, he owns the Hawaiian island of Lana’i, nearly half of Paramount Skydance (a controlling stake), and many other highly lucrative investments, including in Tesla. His daughter, Megan, founded Annapurna Pictures (responsible for Zero Dark Thirty, Her, Phantom Thread, and many more acclaimed films), and his son, David, founded Skydance Media, which merged with Paramount last year (he is now chairman and CEO of the megacorporation). 

Larry himself put up $6 of the $8 billion in financing needed for that merger, which was only given federal approval following CBS’s settlement with Trump over the network’s supposed “fake news” coverage of the 2024 election—an anti-democratic concession, led by the Ellisons, that has set the tone for the media during Trump’s second term (Jeff Bezos’ dismantling of The Washington Post also comes to mind). 

David has been in headlines recently for his leadership at Paramount Skydance, particularly for his continued closeness to the Trump administration and for his subsequent, equally successful antitrust-defying bid to merge with Warner Bros. Discovery in a hostile takeover. David also purchased Bari Weiss’ The Free Press, and hired her to lead CBS News (although her role may already be changing), and now, with the Warner deal, control over CNN is his, as well. 

David and his father are close with American politicians like Marco Rubio, Donald Trump Jr., as well as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with Larry even hosting him in 2021 on his private Hawaiian island and offering him a board seat at Oracle. These ties to major political figures, and how these associations are inextricably intertwined with media interests, are significant factors in the family’s cultivation of a new form of oligarchy. In an era when many things feel unprecedented, this one family’s sphere of influence, with Larry the lion at the top, is a genuinely novel development. To wit, even A-list celebrities are at risk of being blacklisted for speaking out about Palestine or the Paramount-Warner merger, based on unconfirmed reports about the Ellison-backed company’s recent behavior.

There are oligarchic antecedents in American history, as the Gilded Age in the late nineteenth century was defined by figures like John D. Rockefeller and William Randolph Hearst, titans who straddled the worlds of media, finance, and politics, using dominance in one sector as leverage in another. More recently, we can think of someone like former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who likewise rose in finance and the media so as to gain political power and thereby serve his own interests even further.  

The other crucial factor that helps to intensify Larry Ellison’s expanding empire today is the nature of his increasing control over the tech industry in America, notably through a partnership with OpenAI centred on a massive data center buildout. Ellison is making a bet that the AI industry will consolidate around a small batch of players, and that Oracle will be a, or the, dominating force. Meanwhile, Oracle also has a 15% investment in TikTok’s U.S. operations, has an executive on TikTok's board, and houses the platform’s U.S. data and algorithms on Oracle servers.

With Ellison effectively controlling CBS and CNN, and exerting influence far beyond, oligarchic control takes on a far-reaching character, with control not only over how the tech sector is governed (thanks in large part to Oracle’s many-tentacled ecosystem, as well as Trump gladhanding) but also over how all forms of power are reported on (or, rather, not reported on) and circulated. The news media provides approved stories, which TikTok and other platforms spread. This is a network of power whereby the narrative is set from the beginning, calcifying its dominion over public debate and discourse while consolidating every available facet of capital-intensive influence. 

Ownership of the media class, influence over the financial class, and supervision over the platform class? Political power almost comes as an addendum.

Gilded Age 2.0 counts on the rest of us feeling powerless. When you take a step back to appreciate the full scale of the operation, the feeling is inevitably numb: the same family building the data centers, bankrolling AI, and striking deals with the American government and military is also gobbling up media outlets and social platforms that drive public discussion. 

As I’ve long argued, all of this is an attempt to control what kinds of futures are deemed possible or desirable. Larry Ellison is a very specific arbiter of this oligarchic impulse, a figure who has sought and achieved sectoral supremacy but also systemic guidance, whereby technology, media, culture, and politics are remade into a single system with Ellison as its maestro. 

Some readers may be thinking that this is a simplification of how power and influence operate, and they would be right. Even so, the success that Larry Ellison (and his son) have had signals a true disruption in power dynamics in the Global North, what we might refer to as The Great Consolidation. The Ellisons are just one instance of a much larger, much more unwieldy transformation taking place, an inter-capitalist conflict with global implications, but they are a titanic plutocratic force that leverages familial and social ties and banks on the regulatory and governmental side of things to be pulling its own weight (or sitting back, as the case may be). The media is floundering, and tech titans like Ellison have the capital to address those debts, and, bonus!, they effectively win editorial control in the process. 

By seeing this style of power clearly, however, we can begin the work of organizing a response, and overcoming the numbing effect of oligarchy. At the very least, we need to understand that none of these battles can be fought in a vacuum, because the systems that facilitate them are evermore amalgamated. 

Physical and virtual infrastructure coalesce, and the boundaries of debate are set for us. The challenge, then, is to reject the narrative control of these power moves and write a different, more compelling story about our collective future. 

Featured image is "The 'BRAINS,'" Thomas Nast 1871.