The Global Story: Trump’s ‘CEO of everything’

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Speaker 7 Hey there, I'm Asma Khalid.

Speaker 1 And I'm Tristan Redman. And we're here with a new weekly bonus for you from the Global Story Podcast.

Speaker 7 The world order is shifting. Old alliances are fraying and new ones are emerging.
Some of this turbulence can be traced to decisions made in the United States. But the U.S.

Speaker 7 isn't just a cause of the upheaval, its politics politics are also a symptom of it.

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Speaker 1 It's been a big few weeks for a man you might never have heard of, a man who's at the center of Donald Trump's vision for America.

Speaker 8 In the case of Larry, Larry Ellison, it's well beyond technology, is sort of CEO of everything. He's an amazing man, an amazing business person.

Speaker 1 Larry Ellison's company, Oracle, has already cornered the market on AI real estate. Now he's preparing to buy TikTok.

Speaker 1 His son's company owns the movie studio and news giant Paramount, and he's in talks to buy Warner Bros.

Speaker 1 Last month for one day, Larry became the richest person in the world. All of a sudden, Larry Ellison is holding the reins.

Speaker 1 He's building an empire which could shape the US and the world for generations to come.

Speaker 1 From the BBC, I'm Tristan Redman, and today on the Global Story, we explore the vast and growing influence of a man who's been called the Shadow President.

Speaker 11 Hey, hey, all right, here we go.

Speaker 1 Is that Jake?

Speaker 12 Yes, it is.

Speaker 1 Hello, Jake. This is Tristan in London.
How are you doing?

Speaker 13 Not too bad. Not too bad.

Speaker 1 I'm talking to Jake Lahart. He covers the White House for Wired magazine, and he's particularly interested in how Trump World interacts with Silicon Valley.

Speaker 1 I started by asking him where Larry Ellison comes from.

Speaker 14 So he's like an OOG,

Speaker 16 to use an American slang term for a original gangster.

Speaker 18 He really goes back in the Silicon Valley scene. So, you know, we're talking like the 1970s is when he starts getting involved.

Speaker 20 He ends up coming up with this project where it's a database for the CIA, and the code name for it is Oracle.

Speaker 25 And that obviously later becomes the name of the company.

Speaker 1 What exactly is Oracle, Jake?

Speaker 19 Software for hosting various websites, data sets on servers.

Speaker 18 So I would describe it as the

Speaker 16 fundamental infrastructure of the internet.

Speaker 18 I was just actually talking to an NPR host who used the term digital plumbing.

Speaker 20 I think I'm going to steal that now.

Speaker 18 Where whatever your cool startup or product is, or

Speaker 32 whatever your innovation on Wall Street might be with some big fancy model, ultimately that data needs to be stored somewhere.

Speaker 34 It needs to be stored reliably.

Speaker 17 And Oracle ends up developing a real advantage on this front.

Speaker 13 They're also just really good at marketing.

Speaker 20 They're really good at selling other companies these very expensive software products to make them even more money.

Speaker 33 But the thing to emphasize about Ellison in the 90s is it's a lot of flash.

Speaker 27 He's buying foreign jets.

Speaker 20 He likes to fly these jets.

Speaker 33 He's into yachting.

Speaker 20 He owns a sail racing team. And he's always making these big, big purchases of big estates or, you know, with Hawaii, buying up more and more of the island of Lanai to the point where it reaches 98%.

Speaker 1 Are you saying he owns 98% of a Hawaiian island?

Speaker 34 Yes, he does. It's pretty crazy.

Speaker 1 How much did he pay for this island?

Speaker 36 $300 million in 2012.

Speaker 1 $300 million for an island? What does he do with it?

Speaker 27 You know, this is a trend you see with other folks in Silicon Valley.

Speaker 20 Like, this is just kind of an ego thing that these guys do, because when you get that wealthy, there are only so many purchases you can make that no one else can buy, right?

Speaker 27 So he had this kind of larger-than-life persona that really outshadowed, you know, the kind of nuts and bolts of that server business.

Speaker 12 And I think part of that's because he's always seen himself as a storyteller.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, he sounds like a flashy big spender. I mean, one way you can tell how important someone is is how many biographies they've had written about them.

Speaker 1 And Ellison has had a lot of biographies written about him. Some of the titles are quite hysterical.
Yes. And he hint at just kind of what how ruthless his ambition has been over the years.

Speaker 1 And the one title I found funniest of all is What's the difference between Larry Ellison and God?

Speaker 1 God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison. And then there's another one, which is a bit pithier called Everyone Else Must Fail.

Speaker 1 How would you describe his leadership style? What kind of manager of people is he known as?

Speaker 22 Well, I think to the point about, you know, how everyone else must lose, this is a really important

Speaker 19 strain to understand in how Silicon Valley billionaires have really affected politics in the U.S., especially with how they've taken over the Republican Party in a lot of ways, which is this belief that essentially, if your business isn't some version of a monopoly, it's kind of not worth being in that business.

Speaker 22 The nature of the modern economy, especially in tech, is that there is sort of,

Speaker 18 it's a winner-take-all

Speaker 6 ecosystem and that someone gets to the new technology first and then they own it.

Speaker 1 Okay, well, I mean, you mentioned that his belief is that if you're not in a monopoly, then it's not worth being in that realm of business.

Speaker 1 So, I mean, one of the things I really wanted to ask you about today is these realms of business that he is really starting to take over in some ways.

Speaker 1 In fact, Trump has described him as the CEO of everything.

Speaker 1 So I think it would be be easier if we separate these regions of his power into kind of buckets of influence.

Speaker 1 So first of all, in artificial intelligence, and then secondly, in the attention economy, so social media, and then in traditional media.

Speaker 1 So let's start with the first one, which is artificial intelligence. What's the story of Larry Ellison's expansion into artificial intelligence?

Speaker 15 Well, really, this is just because the servers are the lifeblood of artificial intelligence, and that the the

Speaker 17 financial boom that he sees from AI starts in the 2020s when you look at the reality of these large language models, which is that they are very, very resource intensive.

Speaker 39 And to train each generation of those models requires more energy and a lot more data.

Speaker 28 And there are simply very few companies in the world that can provide that level of compute and the ability to scale that at the pace that these companies need.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 he's not actually trying to compete with his own version of AI.

Speaker 1 He's providing the infrastructure for AI companies to function. So it's almost like he's providing the football stadium for the players to play in rather than the actual players themselves.

Speaker 17 Right, right. Or to use a fast food analogy, McDonald's in the U.S., they're not necessarily in the burger business.

Speaker 20 What they're in the business of is real estate because they own the land that the McDonald's franchises sit on.

Speaker 27 And then they are leasing those to a franchisee.

Speaker 38 But they're always going to be fine when, you know, no matter what happens with that McDonald's owners franchise, they have a very valuable plot of land that is useful for any commercial purpose.

Speaker 1 So he's sort of the AI landlord.

Speaker 12 Yeah, that's actually a great way to put it, I think.

Speaker 1 So one of the things that, you know, looking at it from afar, not being a tech billionaire, I mean, I've always assumed that the people who hold power in artificial intelligence are the ones who own and develop the large language models.

Speaker 1 So how does Oracle owning the AI infrastructure translate into power in the industry?

Speaker 34 So that's where I think Ellison has probably the best shake of the deal, no matter where the AI boom goes, because these companies need to invest a ton of money in data centers and in training these models.

Speaker 20 before they can ever look at making a profit.

Speaker 31 And there's an assumption in the valley that AI is on this kind of unstoppable track to keep growing and growing and growing, and that you can justify spending any amount of money on building up the infrastructure to train these models when the goal is to beat China and to reach this benchmark of artificial general intelligence.

Speaker 10 Now,

Speaker 23 if none of that happens,

Speaker 34 Larry Elson still makes a ton of money because they had to invest all this stuff in the data centers, right?

Speaker 17 But that's where he's kind of cornered that front end of the market.

Speaker 22 And with this new boom of trump's second term highly prioritizing expansive growth in ai larry allison's a huge beneficiary of that because for any of that to start you've got to pay oracle to get those servers up and running

Speaker 1 okay so he's the kind of landlord of ai he's the guy who gets paid whatever happens to ai so he has a huge amount of power over the future of the ai industry i want to turn to our next bucket of influence because it's a big one, the attention economy, but really I just mean TikTok because he is now going to be one of the principal owners of TikTok.

Speaker 1 Can you remind me how we got to this stage?

Speaker 9 So I think the first flashpoint for TikTok is around 2020, and it all centers around the Chinese company Bike Dance and this potential for a back door is what people will call it for the Chinese Communist Party to look at americans data president trump is making good on his threat to crack down on two popular chinese-owned social media apps we're looking at tick tock we may be banning tick tock we may be doing some other things signed executive orders banning tick tock and we chat from operating in the u.s within 45 days unless they're sold mr trump says the apps are effectively spyware

Speaker 13 so

Speaker 34 Basically, after Trump's order for ByteDance to divest from TikTok, we get a series of punts.

Speaker 4 And a lot of that is because this is far easier said than done.

Speaker 22 And a lot of Americans really like their TikTok.

Speaker 43 President Trump was speaking out this week about the social media app TikTok as he repeatedly pushes back the deadline for the app's Chinese parent company to either divest or face a ban in the U.S.

Speaker 44 And we're going to watch the security concerns and we have buyers, American buyers, we have American buyers.

Speaker 45 We need to know who's going to own it, right? We need to know who in the United States here is going to own it, which seems like the big part of the...

Speaker 6 Trump Trump extends this essentially like the deadline gets pushed back 90 days over and over and over again.

Speaker 35 We get to January of 2025.

Speaker 46 Well, thank you very much.

Speaker 8 And it's an honor to be here today.

Speaker 17 So Trump's getting questions in the Oval Office about whether he wants Elon Musk to buy TikTok.

Speaker 4 Are you open to Elon buying TikTok?

Speaker 8 I would be if he wanted to buy it, yeah.

Speaker 15 Instead of running with that, which Trump is often prone to do, he says,

Speaker 8 I'd like Larry to buy it too.

Speaker 24 I want Larry to buy it, as in in Ellison.

Speaker 24 And from that point on, TikTok was seen as Larry Ellison's asset to lose at that point, that he was seen as the clear favorite for whatever the U.S. ownership version of this company would look like.

Speaker 1 Why did Trump want Larry Ellison to buy TikTok?

Speaker 14 That is kind of unclear.

Speaker 32 Other than

Speaker 14 Ellison

Speaker 22 really proved his worth as a savvy operator for Trump. I mean, a lot of the credit that he gets from my sources around the president and Trump advisors is that, you know, he stays under the radar.

Speaker 34 He's not like Elon Musk, sort of just spouting off on hot button issues and getting himself in trouble.

Speaker 22 And side note, Oracle has been, this whole time has been providing cloud computing and servers.

Speaker 26 for U.S.

Speaker 34 user data on TikTok. So he's already been making money off of it.

Speaker 1 And where have we landed then with the ownership of TikTok?

Speaker 22 So in September 2025, Trump approves this new consortium of U.S.

Speaker 34 owners to run TikTok stateside.

Speaker 47 Interesting.

Speaker 35 Let's see what the deal is.

Speaker 48 Gives Americans an 80% stake in TikTok. Which Americans? Well, you'll never guess.
Yes, Larry Ellison is one of them.

Speaker 49 That they will be part of a group to take over TikTok's algorithm.

Speaker 28 And Larry Ellison is leading it.

Speaker 37 He

Speaker 23 will be the majority holder of this new American version of TikTok.

Speaker 1 Yes. Okay.
So Larry Ellison at this point owns some of the most critical infrastructure for artificial intelligence in the United States.

Speaker 1 He now owns also one of the biggest social media networks in the United States. But what's he doing with traditional media, with legacy media? How's he expanding his influence here?

Speaker 15 So that's where the trajectory of the Ellison family dynasty could get really interesting and at a potential unprecedented level of power, at least in modern times.

Speaker 28 And Larry Elson, by the way, is 81.

Speaker 30 He's older than Donald Trump.

Speaker 31 So, like Rupert Burdock, he has placed a son in a position to carry this business into the next era.

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Speaker 13 who is his son david so david ellison is larry's basically clear heir to the family fortune david ellison is interesting in the sense that david actually got his start wanting to be an actor so his big big shot is this 2006 movie called flyboys it's a world war one drama.

Speaker 22 He co-stars alongside James Franco.

Speaker 28 About $60 million of the family fortune gets put into this money, where David, the son, privately finances it with another executive.

Speaker 32 And,

Speaker 32 you know, it's a like an okay movie, but David's performance in it doesn't really lead to any future promising work.

Speaker 20 And that's where

Speaker 1 is it respectable, his performance?

Speaker 35 Look, if I'm taking my reporter hat on and I'm going back to my days as an art critic for my college newspaper, I would say no.

Speaker 24 He looks like a fish out of water in the performance, I gotta say.

Speaker 1 Okay, so how does he go from being a

Speaker 1 reportedly failed actor?

Speaker 1 I'm gonna couch that carefully,

Speaker 1 to being a media magnate.

Speaker 27 Yeah, so when I spoke to this source of mine who knows the Ellison family, they were basically saying that the movie was a turning point for David where he starts to tell people that he wants to work behind the camera.

Speaker 31 Now, normally that would mean like, you know, director, producer, a key grip,

Speaker 28 somewhere on the on the crew, right?

Speaker 18 That's not what he actually means.

Speaker 38 He ends up having this production company under him called Skydance,

Speaker 35 and they get very ambitious with their mergers and acquisitions.

Speaker 32 So they end up acquiring Paramount.

Speaker 19 Paramount includes the broadcast network CBS, and they are regulated under this agency called the Federal Communications Commission.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 32 that broadcast license gives the federal government a lot of leverage over these broadcast companies in a way that just hasn't been applied before, but Trump's able to exploit it in terms of kind of weakening the foundation of Paramount to make this merger more appealing for the Trump administration to allow.

Speaker 47 The FCC approved Skydance Media's $8 billion bid to acquire CBS News parent company, Paramount.

Speaker 54 The stamp of approval from the FCC comes after months of turmoil revolving around President Trump's legal battle with 60 Minutes.

Speaker 27 We have Trump suing the CBS network for this interview that Kamala Harris did on 60 Minutes, where they simply edited out a portion of her answer.

Speaker 47 Mr. Trump accused the CBS news program 60 Minutes of deceptively editing an interview with then presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

Speaker 14 That is normally not grounds for a libel or defamation lawsuit, but Trump gets them to settle.

Speaker 10 for around $20 million.

Speaker 53 This is a deal getting the green light just weeks after Paramount agreed to settle with the Trump administration.

Speaker 47 What's more, as part of the deal, Skydance agreed to address the Trump administration's concerns about alleged bias at CBS.

Speaker 27 Trump's able to get not just 20 million bucks out of this thing, but also an agreement from CBS to provide this kind of vague form of pro-Trump programming.

Speaker 21 Then the merger starts moving through.

Speaker 28 The late night comedian Stephen Colbert becomes kind of a sacrificial lamb, where around the time of the the merger, his show is announced that it's going to end after its run of the current season.

Speaker 4 And of course, Stephen Colbert is one of the most critical and I would argue most effective comedians in our country at really needling Trump.

Speaker 27 And clearly he's been a thorn in his side for years.

Speaker 1 So the Ellisons want to make this merger happen, but it sounds like the Trump administration has a lot of influence over whether Paramount and Skydance, the Ellison's company, can merge.

Speaker 1 Paramount has to agree to paying out for the CBS interview with Kamala Harris. Yep.
And they have Stephen Colbert taken off the air for the deal to go through. Is that what you're saying?

Speaker 27 Colbert was sort of a casualty of the deal, I think is the better way to understand it. But, you know, Colbert has remained outspoken after that announcement was made.

Speaker 38 That was kind of the clear

Speaker 27 sign of dominance, I would say, for the fact that like this company must submit for for this merger to go through and

Speaker 31 there was a price that had to be paid beyond the monetary one for the government to allow it.

Speaker 1 What happens next for the Ellison's media empire?

Speaker 30 So for this to be the kind of major force that people worry it might be would require more mergers and steps to happen that aren't necessarily as easy as they may be presented.

Speaker 20 So the big one on the entertainment front would be this $70 billion bid for Warner Brothers Discovery.

Speaker 43 The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Paramount Skydance is preparing an Ellison-backed bid for Warner Brothers Discovery.

Speaker 45 This news.

Speaker 19 Warner Brothers Discovery has just a really valuable mix of properties that they were about to spin off in the coming year.

Speaker 18 So those include CNN, which is one of our biggest cable news networks.

Speaker 34 They are the cable news network with the largest international presence by far.

Speaker 27 They also have HBO.

Speaker 20 That's where shows like The Wired, The Sopranos, Succession.

Speaker 24 They have a Harry Potter franchise.

Speaker 27 They have Barbie, which was supposed to have been splitting off or spinning off, I should say.

Speaker 19 The reason that this, the timing of this acquisition would be huge for Ellison is that if they can acquire Warner Brothers Discovery before they were going to spin off these other properties, that would allow the Ellison media empire to merge CNN CNN and CBS, having an even larger share over our news ecosystem.

Speaker 18 This journalist by the name of Barry Weiss will have a major leadership role.

Speaker 46 A major shift in the landscape of TV news. Paramount Skydance announcing that they've made Barry Weiss editor-in-chief of CBS News.

Speaker 46 She's known for her outspoken support of Israel and strong takes on polarizing topics, including gun rights, diversity, and inclusion programs.

Speaker 27 She currently runs this newer outlet called the Free Press, which is sort of framing itself as against the excesses of political correctness and liberal bias in US media.

Speaker 6 So, you know, when we already have only a handful of these companies overseeing most of our news organizations in America, you know, you're talking about a lot of pro-Trump real estate in that landscape, if all this goes through.

Speaker 1 Okay, so Skydance, the Ellison's company, has said that they are committed to diversity in their programming and that their main main journalistic output CBS's reporting is still going to be fair and unbiased and fact-based.

Speaker 1 Nonetheless, there is a huge amount of media power at this point accumulated in the hands of the Ellison family.

Speaker 4 How is all of that legal?

Speaker 1 Isn't there monopoly competition law in the United States? How does that happen?

Speaker 18 There is, but it all depends on who enforces it.

Speaker 18 It depends on who's in charge of the Federal Trade Commission and then also the Federal Communications Commission with Brendan Carr, who's become become one of the big characters of the Trump administration.

Speaker 47 FCC Chairman Brendan Carr spoke about the merger and the administration's approach earlier today.

Speaker 55 President Trump is fundamentally reshaping the media landscape. And the way he's doing that is when he ran for election, he ran directly at these legacy broadcast media outlets, ABC, NBC, CBS.

Speaker 31 And, you know, he's made it pretty clear that, you know, you're going to have to kind of do a favor for the administration by having, the way he'll put it, is programming in the interests of the American people.

Speaker 56 For years, government officials just allowed those entities with execs sitting in Hollywood and New York to dictate the political narrative.

Speaker 27 But really, you're talking about kind of being aligned with the administration's agenda and politics as a prerequisite for having your business go through.

Speaker 1 Is Brendan Carr the same guy who pressured ABC to cancel Jimmy Kimmel, who pressured Disney to cancel Jimmy Kimmel from his late night show.

Speaker 14 Yes, exactly.

Speaker 1 So we've gone through these big buckets of influence that Larry Ellison and his family have amassed over the last few years. So he's got a hold of AI infrastructure.

Speaker 1 He's about to own TikTok, which has huge political influence. And he's extending his influence into quote-unquote legacy media, film studios, news channels, and it just seems to be growing.

Speaker 1 This is a kind of new level of power and influence in the United States. Is Larry Ellison a modern day Robert Baron, like a kind of a Carnegie or a Rockefeller?

Speaker 20 I think a good comparison would be what the Ellison family has become to data and attention is what a Vanderbilt family was to the railroads in the U.S.

Speaker 14 or the Rockefellers to oil, where it's this combination of business and political influence that is just so large that it's almost impossible for any other individual or organization to try to rival it, where, you know, this could really

Speaker 20 set the U.S.

Speaker 27 on a kind of longer-term, you know, semi-permanent pro-Republican conservative media apparatus that so far, at least on TV, you know, has really been limited to Fox News.

Speaker 22 I mean, there are a number of conservative outlets online.

Speaker 6 Conservative podcasters have been doing very well in the U.S., but that's all disparate and spread out and fractured, right?

Speaker 38 Like there has not been anything that's been this kind of totalitizing mega structure that seems to be in the works here from the Allison family.

Speaker 1 Well, you mentioned the Vanderbilts who built U.S. railroads, right? But now you're looking at a man who's in control of the data and attention spans

Speaker 1 of people of the United States, which and people who control attention and data in that way, it feels to me like they sort of control almost everything.

Speaker 1 You control politics, you control what's popular, you control what sells. I mean, has anybody in the United States ever potentially had as much power and influence as this one man?

Speaker 6 Hands down, no.

Speaker 12 And that's the thing.

Speaker 22 Is attention is, in a lot of ways, kind of the most valuable commodity in our modern era.

Speaker 16 I mean, yes, we have rare earth minerals and all these other, you know, physical, tangible things, but the fact is, for each one of us, all of our attention is equally scarce.

Speaker 19 We only have so many waking hours of the day, and you add in

Speaker 13 this really, really potent combination of popular entertainment platforms and a large, large chunk of, you know, live video news in an era when, just let's face it younger people consume video first so that's where if you look at this in the future when millennials and Gen Z are the majority of the population and then they're the ones who are in charge in the US that's where I think they could be much more affected by the media and attention component of this empire

Speaker 1 Jake thank you so much Thanks for having me on.

Speaker 12 And thank you for highlighting Larry Elson.

Speaker 1 That was Jake LeHart, a senior writer at Wired magazine. Today's episode was made by Sam Chantarasak, Aaron Keller, and Annie Brown.
It was engineered by Travis Evans, and I'm Tristan Redman.

Speaker 1 If you like this episode, then you might also like our episode from September 23rd on whether Apple can cut ties with China.

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Speaker 1 Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.
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