Warning: Larry Ellison and the Authoritarian Dream Trump Wants Him to Build

How One Tech Titan Became the Most Dangerous Man You’ve Never Voted For

Warning: Larry Ellison and the Authoritarian Dream Trump Wants Him to Build

How One Tech Titan Became the Most Dangerous Man You’ve Never Voted For

The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #575: Thursday, October 2nd, 2025.

There are billionaires who buy yachts.
There are billionaires who buy islands.
And then there are billionaires who try to buy history itself.

Larry Ellison belongs in the last category.

He’s not content with databases and cloud contracts. He’s positioning himself to become the architect of a surveillance-driven…data-dominated…loyalty-policed America…the perfect complement to Trump’s authoritarian ambitions.

If you think that sounds dramatic…buckle in. Because the plan is not speculation. It’s already taking shape.

Who Is Larry Ellison…Really?

Ellison, co-founder of Oracle…has always thrived on control.

His empire was built on databases…software that organizes and stores the world’s information.

But unlike Microsoft, which became a household name…Oracle stayed mostly in the background…quietly running banks…hospitals…governments.

That’s Ellison’s style:

Not the flashy frontman…but the man who owns the pipes. If data is oil…Ellison built the refineries.

Now, in Trump’s second act…Ellison has emerged from the shadows. No longer just a donor. Not merely a “tech titan.” Trump’s insiders have called him a shadow president…and the description sticks.

Why? Because Ellison sits at the crossroads of everything Trump wants to control:

Your data…your feeds…your health records…your security cameras…your cloud.

Why Trump Wants Him

Trump’s dream is simple: build a state that runs not on laws and institutions…but on loyalty and fear. That dream needs infrastructure.

• A surveillance web to keep tabs on the “enemy within.”

• Platforms that favor his narrative.

• Centralized health and identity data that can be toggled like a switch.

• Procurement power that locks government into loyal vendors.

Ellison is uniquely positioned to deliver all of that. Not Zuckerberg. Not Musk. Not Bezos. Ellison.

Because Ellison believes surveillance is a virtue. He once bragged that AI-driven monitoring would make citizens “behave.” That’s not a slip…that’s a worldview.

And Trump hears it as music.

The Four Fronts of the Ellison Plan

1. The Platform Chokepoint

Ellison’s Oracle became the “trusted tech” partner for TikTok’s U.S. operations. On paper…that’s about security. In practice…it makes Ellison the gatekeeper of the attention pipeline for America’s youth.

Think about that:

The man advising Trump has his hands on the algorithm that shapes the feeds of 100+ million Americans. He doesn’t need to edit content directly. By controlling the backend infrastructure…he influences what’s stored…logged, flagged…and slowed down.

In authoritarian systems…censorship rarely looks like book burning. It looks like invisible throttling.

2. The Surveillance Thesis

Ellison’s belief: the more cameras, the more AI, the more behavior improves.

That means:

• City cameras…school cameras…transit feeds…license plate readers…retail scanners…all stitched together.

• Oracle’s cloud crunching the images with facial recognition and predictive analytics.

• Government dashboards lit up with “threat scores.”

Sound familiar? It should. It’s how China’s social credit system works.

But Ellison sells it as efficiency. Trump sells it as “law and order.”

What you get is a society where walking down the street means your face is in a database…and whether you get flagged depends on who’s in charge.

3. Health Data Consolidation

During COVID…Oracle muscled into health data. It backed HHS Protect…a massive federal dashboard criticized for secrecy. Then Ellison’s company bought Cerner, giving Oracle control over VA and DoD health records.

Trump sees Ellison as the man who can build a national patient ID…real-time disease tracker…and integrated health registry. Useful in theory. Dangerous in practice.

Why? Because whoever controls health data controls who gets treatment…who gets flagged…and who gets denied.

And when the man at the top is Trump…the weaponization isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

4. The Procurement Trap

Ellison’s Oracle has always played the long game: lock customers into proprietary systems. Once a government agency runs on Oracle…switching is nearly impossible.

Trump wants Ellison to do that to America itself. Standardize on Oracle. Mandate its cloud. Make federal…state…and even local agencies dependent.

That’s not just a contract. That’s a stranglehold.

What This Means for You

This isn’t abstract. It touches daily life in four ways:

Your Privacy

Expect denser data trails: health records…DMV…benefits…school IDs…all stitched together.

More eyes on your movements. More logs of your online activity.

Your Speech

Platform moderation could quietly shift. Not outright bans…just fewer people seeing your post if it criticizes the “wrong” figures.

Technical policy tweaks disguised as “safety” decisions.

Your Health

Medical data controlled by a vendor with a history of secrecy.

Less transparency about failures…more risk of politically motivated targeting.

Your Wallet

Vendor lock-in means higher costs…fewer options…slower innovation. You pay through taxes and diminished choice.

The Real Threat: Democracy as Dashboard

Imagine an America where:

• Every protest is filmed and logged in real time.

• Every health record sits in a database managed by a single vendor.

• Every social platform must “prove loyalty” to the administration through “trusted tech” partners.

• Every government contract flows to one cloud provider.

That’s not a free country. That’s a dashboard dictatorship.

It looks efficient. It feels sleek. It runs on AI and “security.” And it smothers democracy under the weight of data.

How Americans Can Prepare

Ellison wants a nation of passive consumers. Trump wants a nation of fearful subjects. Your job is to be neither.

Mentally:

• Accept that more surveillance is coming. The point isn’t to panic…it’s to stay alert.

• Don’t let “safety” rhetoric seduce you. Surveillance is never neutral.

Psychologically:

• Resist fatalism. Systems like this feed on resignation: “That’s just how it is.”

• Build resilience by focusing on community…neighbors…networks…watchdog groups.

Practically:

• Protect your privacy: use strong authentication…control what apps track…support encryption.

• Demand transparency: every city council…every state legislature must vote on new surveillance tech. No more back-room deployments.

• Diversify: if you run a business or institution…avoid single-vendor lock-in. Write exit clauses into contracts.

Politically:

• Push representatives to mandate audit logs and transparency reports for any government-vendor partnership.

• Insist on open standards so data can move between providers.

• Support watchdog orgs that litigate for privacy and transparency.

The Shadow President Has No Desire to Be President

Larry Ellison doesn’t want to run for president. He doesn’t need to.

When you own the pipes…the cloud…the health data…the surveillance dashboards…the platform backdoors…you don’t need a title. You own the rails the republic runs on.

That’s the danger. Trump is betting on Ellison not just to fund him…not just to advise him…but to build the architecture of control that outlasts him.

And if we let that architecture solidify, it won’t matter who wins elections. The pipes will already be loyal to a man, not a nation.

The real fight is not just ballots. It’s not just speeches. It’s who owns the infrastructure of trust.

Right now…Ellison is buying it. Trump is selling it. And unless America wakes up…democracy is the collateral.

BONUS: Inside the Oracle-How Larry Ellison Turns Pipes Into Power

There are moguls who chase headlines…and there are moguls who build the plumbing the headlines run on.

Larry Ellison is the latter…the man behind the pipes.

Databases…clouds…back-ends…the “trusted” conduit where other people’s information lives and other people’s decisions get made.

That’s always been his edge:

You don’t need to own the show if you own the stage…the lights, and the power switch.

Now put that temperament next to Trump’s appetite for control and you see why Ellison is not just another donor.

He’s the systems architect for a political project that wants to govern not merely by policy, but by platform…to rule from the dashboard. And a nation ruled from a dashboard is a nation ruled by whoever holds the admin keys.

The Ellison Method: Own the rails…set the rules

Ellison didn’t become one of the richest men alive by selling shiny objects to consumers. He sold lock-in to institutions.

He sold permanence: massive contracts that make switching vendors painful and expensive. In government…that logic is rocket fuel. If an agency’s records…analytics… and workflows live inside your stack…if its migrations…integrations…and budget cycles depend on you…you don’t just have a customer; you have a captive.

That’s the core of the Ellison method:

• Monopolize the back-end.

• Normalize surveillance as “safety.”

• Bundle the contract so tightly no rival can pry it open.

• Call the whole thing modernization.

Do that across health…identity…security cameras…and social-media infrastructure and you haven’t just won market share…you’ve built a private governance layer under the public one.

The platform chokepoint: TikTok’s backplane… American-style

If you want to understand the new leverage…watch TikTok.

The White House and Congress forced a U.S. carve-out; Ellison’s Oracle surged to the center as the “trusted” tech steward…and now a leading investor…in a deal that shifts control of U.S. TikTok to a consortium anchored by Oracle…Silver Lake…and partners.

What matters is less the cap table and more the choke point:

Oracle sits at the heart of the algorithm…data…and compliance plumbing for the most potent youth-attention engine in the country.

That’s the bloodstream of culture.

No one needs to wave a censor’s wand.

In modern platforms…policy is implemented in code: where logs are kept…what gets flagged for “integrity” review…how classifiers are tuned…which experiments are allowed in the ranking system…and who audits the auditors.

Put a political project near that machinery and you don’t have to say “downrank X.”

You can adjust “safety” dials…redefine “coordinated behavior,” change what’s “borderline,” and claim it’s all in service of “national security.”

The public sees a neutral dashboard. Insiders see the knobs.

That’s why Ellison’s role is prized: he offers Trump a case for control that sounds like patriotism and looks like engineering.

The surveillance thesis: “Citizens will be on their best behavior”

Ellison has said the quiet part out loud. He believes that pervasive monitoring…constant recording and reporting…makes people behave.

Not everyone who builds surveillance tech confesses the philosophy behind it. Ellison has. And he’s doubled down as AI makes it cheaper…faster…and easier to fuse every camera and dataset into one interpretive feed.

That’s not a bug in his worldview; it’s the feature.

Now imagine that thesis scaled with federal blessing: public-private camera meshes stitched to facial recognition…plate readers tied to cloud analytics…school and stadium feeds pooled with city networks…a live map of life.

The sales pitch is irresistible to politicians who want order without debate: crime down, response up, “nothing to hide, nothing to fear.”

But the risk is baked in: false positives…biased models…watchlists without due process. And once the infrastructure is there…it is always easier to broaden the use than to roll it back.

Health is power: owning the nation’s chart

Data is leverage; health data is the lever.

Ellison’s biggest bet in years was buying Cerner and folding it into Oracle Health… inheriting the VA and DoD electronic medical record transformation…a gigantic… troubled program suddenly under his brand.

Critics have documented outages…safety hazards…and spiraling costs; Oracle responded with corporate volleys and promises of fixes.

The point here is not adjudicating every claim. The point is recognizing the ambition:

Ellison wants to be the backbone of American healthcare’s information layer. And that means national-scale identity rails…claims pipes…and clinical analytics under one roof.

We have seen the centralized instinct before.

In 2020…the federal government stood up HHS Protect…a sweeping pandemic dashboard that pulled sensitive data streams into an opaque environment criticized by journalists and watchdogs for secrecy and accountability gaps.

That centralized mentality…collect first…explain later…is the cultural backdrop for today’s push to “integrate” more.

In a vacuum of rules and sunshine…the contractor becomes the custodian…and policy becomes product.

Under a Trump-Ellison arrangement…don’t be surprised by proposals for a national patient ID…real-time registries…and “risk-based” access driven by analytics you don’t get to see.

The promise will be speed and safety. The price will be visibility without recourse.

Procurement as politics: the vendor-state

Ellison’s other genius is contracting…knowing how to win the RFP you helped write.

If Trump wants compliant infrastructure…Ellison can help produce it with bundled… cross-agency deals that “standardize” on Oracle for “security” and “efficiency.”

The result: vendor lock-in at the scale of a nation.

Open competition looks messy; a single throat to choke sounds tidy. And once half the government’s sensitive workloads sit behind your consoles…your lobbying dollars don’t just buy access…they defend the installed base.

(See the recent reporting on Oracle’s influence spend as it positioned for the TikTok prize…and the longer record of political giving.)

You can call this modernization. Or you can call it what it is when politics chooses the vendor and the vendor shapes the politics: a private operating system for public power.

Why Ellison is more useful to Trump than Musk, Zuckerberg, or Bezos

Musk is volatile, Zuckerberg is reputationally constrained, Bezos is diversified and PR-sensitive.

Ellison has something rarer: a coherent theory of control combined with the tech stack to implement it.

He doesn’t need to win hearts. He needs to win interfaces: APIs and admin panels.

That’s subtler than owning a newspaper or a social network and…in many ways…more decisive.

If you govern by dashboard…the person who designs the dashboard is not a vendor… he’s a co-author of the state.

This is also why “shadow president” resonated: it described a role less like cabinet secretary and more like chamberlain of the pipes…the figure who decides how the palace runs…who gets keys to which rooms…and which hallways get cameras. (That’s not a conspiracy; that’s a procurement chart.)

How it hits ordinary Americans…tangible…not theoretical

Your feed:

If Oracle engineers and audits the back-end for the app that reaches your kids…the definition of “harm”and the thresholds for “integrity” action will shape what they see.

A small technical change can erase a movement’s reach for a week…no memo required.

Your face:

Public-private surveillance meshes are built fastest in the name of “partnership.” Retail cameras become city cameras become “regional awareness.” You won’t get to vote on each hop unless your city forces it.

Your chart:

If your hospital runs Oracle’s EHR and the federal dashboard expects Oracle-friendly data, interoperability means Oracle’s way. Failures will be “edge cases.” Fixes will be “in the next release.”

Your bill:

Lock-in raises switching costs; tri-vendor competition collapses to mono-vendor dependency. Agencies pay more. Taxpayers pay always. (And services degrade quietly because migrating off is a five-year war.)

The five red flags to watch next:

1. Executive or agency directives naming Oracle as a “trusted” steward for “AI safety,” social-platform oversight…or national data utilities…language that seems neutral but effectively pre-awards categories of work.

2. Cross-agency “standardize on X” memos that shrink competition under the banner of security. If portability clauses are weak…the die is cast.

3. Public-private camera fusions: announcements of regional “situational awareness” hubs that combine city feeds with retail/stadium/school networks and deploy face recognition at “pilot scale.”

4. Opaque health dashboards revived for “national preparedness” with NDAs that block FOIA or limit third-party audits…HHS Protect redux with a new coat of paint.

5. Platform audit regimes for TikTok that are technically impressive and procedurally unreviewable…lots of engineering jargon…little public accountability.

Countermeasures: how to fight a dashboard state

At the federal level

Procurement sunlight:

Any “trusted vendor” designation must publish security findings…uptime…portability guarantees…and exit costs. Make the price of leaving public up front.

Data portability by statute:

Mandate open standards and enforceable SLAs for export. If government is locked in… that’s not security…that’s capture.

Platform transparency:

If the government (or its proxy) audits or supervises a social platform…publish audit logs…who requested what…under which authority…and with what effect on reach.

At the state/city level

Community Control of Police Surveillance (CCOPS)-style ordinances:

Require councils to vote on any new surveillance tech with impact reports…retention limits…independent accuracy/bias audits…and automatic sunsets.

Health IT guardrails:

For any statewide EHR or data-exchange deal…require independent clinical safety audits with public summaries; ban gag clauses that hide downtime or adverse events.

Diversified procurement:

Build multi-vendor clouds and bind agencies to portability benchmarks; give CIOs a budget line item for exit preparedness the same way you fund cyber insurance.

For institutions and businesses

• Bake interoperability and termination-assistance into every contract.

• Demand SOC 2 / FedRAMP evidence…independent red-team reports…and a clear incident-response playbook where you control disclosure…not the vendor.

• For cameras/analytics: require third-party bias and error-rate disclosures for your population…set short retention windows by default.

For individuals

• Use hardware keys or app-based 2FA…password managers…device encryption.

• Limit app permissions…turn off default cloud logging where you can.

• Practice information discipline: don’t feed your face and location to systems you don’t have to.

The psychology piece: how to live through panopticon creep

Authoritarian systems don’t need you to love them; they need you to accept them.

Ellison’s vision of “citizens on their best behavior” is the end state of internalized surveillance…where you calibrate yourself because the camera might be there…because the classifier might be listening.

The antidote isn’t bravado; it’s calm noncompliance with the psychological script:

• Name the pressure (“I am being nudged to self-censor”).

• Limit the surrender (share intentionally, not reflexively).

• Widen the circle (social support makes vigilance sustainable).

• Insist on procedure (demand votes…audits…logs…concrete friction slows quiet overreach).

Why this matters even if you like Oracle’s tech

You can admire engineering and still reject political consolidation.

You can want secure clouds and still demand competition. You can want safer streets and still insist that surveillance power flows through law you can see…not vendor terms you can’t.

That’s the line in a republic: tools serve rights; rights don’t serve tools.

And that’s the heart of the Ellison danger. He’s not proposing a debate about tradeoffs. He’s proposing a default—totalizing data capture with governance outsourced to the people who built it. In a vacuum of rules, the admin panel becomes the constitution.

The close: the oracle speaks, but the demos decides

Larry Ellison has spent a lifetime building the pipes.

Trump wants him to turn those pipes into policy…to prove that you don’t need to censor if you can re-weight…you don’t need to nationalize if you can standardize…you don’t need to arrest if you can observe and nudge.

It’s clever. It’s elegant. And it is utterly corrosive to a system that’s supposed to be run by laws…not dashboards.

This isn’t a call to smash the machines. It’s a call to govern them…to put portability… auditability…sunlight…and civic consent ahead of vendor convenience and political convenience.

Because if we don’t…the arrangement will govern us. Not loudly. Not with boots and fists. But with settings…the quietest tyranny ever engineered.

If you want a free country…don’t just defend the ballot box. Defend the admin box. That’s where this fight is headed…and Ellison is already there waiting…with the keys in his hand.

Step quickly and confidently. Eyes up…looking forward. Grit…always.

I’ll be back soon.

-Jack

P.S. The cuts to security. The grabs for health data. The platform choke points. They all add up.

Don’t fall for the illusion that it’s just “business.” It’s politics by other means…and it’s power by every means.

Your job is simple: don’t be silent…don’t be passive…and don’t accept the excuse that “efficiency” justifies authoritarian control.

Because once the pipes harden…the flow of freedom dries up.