From CBS News to Oxford University, Zionist Billionaire Larry Ellison is Colonizing the Corridors of Power
When American newspapers framed President Donald Trump’s September visit to Great Britain as the latest symbolic exchange between a dominant empire and a faded one, they followed the approach generally desired by these exchanges’ operators and missed the bigger empire-building project at play. This new imperial project is hiding in plain sight. It encompasses America’s and Britain’s military, corporate, media, and education complexes—currently collaborating in a major “reinvention” of the Middle East via force, displacement, commerce, and propaganda. Its most influential player locates his loyalties firmly with these complexes’ major client and the hinge of their Middle East operation: Israel.
The latter-day Cecil Rhodes in question is Larry Ellison. Founder and Chairman of Oracle and a close friend and supporter of Donald Trump, Ellison previously made the news for making the largest single one-time donation to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), $16.6 million in 2017 on top of $10 million three years before that. He is also known to use Oracle to provide cyber services for Israel. But Ellison’s military presence is a pale image of what is becoming his role as the public relations hinge for an empire run from America with outposts in Britain and facilitated by Zionists.
Understanding how means understanding Ellison’s role among not just American Jewish Zionist billionaires but American billionaires generally, which is rare even in this rarified circle. Bill Ackman, as I reported in a past piece for the Libertarian Institute, may be the unasked-for Patrick Henry of the reactionary military corporate class, always available and eager to vocalize (and reveal) his class’s latest stealth project of social control. But Ackman is playing only with a $9.4 billion dollar fortune. Larry Ellison, whose fortune, like most entrepreneurs, has been turbocharged thanks to government investment in Silicon Valley beginning in the 1990s, is worth $383.6 billion more than that. This means that Ellison doesn’t have to cast himself as an orator in order to secure standing space inside the proverbial “room where it happens”; he can actually sit at the table and initiate plays. Since Donald Trump’s election in 2024, he has done this in a fashion to take one’s breath away without leaving anyone breathless by provoking too much careful notice.
Around the same stretch of weeks that Donald Trump made his state visit to Britain, reports broke of Ellison’s Oracle acquiring Paramount, the parent company of CBS and owner of a collection of media and entertainment companies with wide public reach, and so forming Skydance; of Ellison acquiring a stake in the social media company TikTok; and of Ellison “bankrolling a massive for-profit research campus costing upward of $1.3 billion” at Oxford University in Britain, “the planned home of his Ellison Institute of Technology by 2027.” The media acquisitions were covered by the business sections of major newspapers and business websites. They were also covered in a New York Times profile of Shari Redstone, the owner of Paramount who sold it to the Ellison family, and a Times’ profile of Ellison’s stake in TikTok and his friendship with Trump. The depth and breadth of Ellison’s Oxford venture has only been reported in recent investigations in The New York Times (in August) and The Wall Street Journal (in September.) None of the coverage of these acquisitions and ventures goes much beneath the surface. But the details behind them, and of the players who along with Ellison made them possible, reveal the real game at play: controlling information to support Zionism and Empire and priming a population to accept these controls.
Ellison Colonizes American Media via Paramount Skydance
Ellison’s Paramount Skydance bid was achieved through his son, David, who has spent the past year actively courting Redstone and her family. The Times’ profile of Redstone assigned the reason for Redstone’s eventual sale of Paramount to Ellison to Redstone’s bout with cancer, to her focus on Zionist philanthropic causes after October 7, 2023, and to the “deep pockets” of the Ellison Family. But stray details outside and inside the profile suggest another possible reason: to concentrate Zionist power over information flows.
Unmentioned in the story is that both Redstone and the Ellisons are ardent Zionists—just as the past owners or leaders of CBS in the 1980s and 1990s, Laurence Tisch and Mel Karmazin, were members of Zionist families. Mentioned in the story but not developed is an idea Ellison floated to Redstone in their negotiations for Paramount, when he:
“…talked about his ability to make strategic acquisitions (perhaps even a stake in TikTok, the wildly popular video-sharing platform, the Redstones speculated) and unify Paramount’s disparate technology platforms.”
These discussions about TikTok took place in 2024, at around the moment when calls for a TikTok ban were gaining momentum in Washington DC, explicitly to combat what the bans’ proponents called anti-semitic content on the platform, even though the content at issue was mostly anti-Zionist. The Paramount sale was finalized in 2025, by which point Redstone’s CBS had become a prominent target of President Trump’s second administration. Soon after this, the sale of TikTok to a consortium including Ellison, facilitated by Trump officials, was finalized as well. Not just the timing but also the players involved in these sales are suggestive. The generally-agreed-upon architect of the Paramount deal was Gerry Cardinale of RedBird Capital, who has deep, long-running ties to Zionism and its elite practitioners, and to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, vital allies of Israel. Ellison’s partner on the TikTok deal was Silver Lake, whose co-founder, Glenn Hutchins, also has deep, lifelong ties to Zionists in the same specific network as Cardinale’s. Hutchins’s Silver Lake recently executed a recent $55 billion takeover of Electronic Arts: the videogame publishing company responsible for shaping the experiences of countless young American men. This deal, instructively, was done in conjunction with both the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which as I reported for the Libertarian Institute in April of this year has deep ties to Zionists; and Affinity Partners, the investment firm founded by Jared Kushner, a lifelong Zionist with lifelong family ties to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As I reported for the Libertarian Institute in February of this year, Affinity Partners is an integral part of American imperial development projects abroad, from Saudi Arabia to Gaza to the former Yugoslavia, all of which hinge on the regional dominance of Israel.
Considered in this larger context of the players involved and the TikTok deal on the side, what is being presented as a responsible handover of Paramount from the Redstones to the Ellisons looks like a strategic play run by Zionists. Namely, a passing of the torch by one Zionist family to another with deeper pockets and better connections to the current administration, to maintain and concentrate pro-Zionist content.
Reinforcing this suspicion is the fact, also not mentioned in media reports, that both latter-day CBS stewards, the Redstones and the Ellisons, have relationships to Bari Weiss: the ferociously Zionist founder and editor-in-chief of The Free Press, which David Ellison has purchased even as he has brought Weiss onboard as editor-in-chief of CBS News. A closer look at Weiss’s career gives a sense of the direction in which CBS’s new pro-Zionist content will likely run, and reinforces the notion of a power play at work. Weiss is a protégé of several major Zionist players: first of Bret Stephens at The Wall Street Journal; then Alana Newhouse and David Samuels at Tablet magazine. Before all of this, she was an undergraduate pro-Israel activist at Columbia University; Samuel Moyn, a Jewish anti-Zionist scholar of human rights who taught her there, told The New York Times that “she’s been, from what I can tell, the same person all the way, she’s an extremely gifted ideological operative.”
But what makes Weiss’s ideological operation so tricky is that she disguises it beneath the veneer of “centrism”—a bait-and-switch she’s borrowed from American media of the 1990s and 2000s, when most of the players who shaped her either made or reached the peak of their careers. Her closest fellow traveler among journalists is probably The New York Times’ Ezra Klein, a liberal Zionist, who sees her as involved in his fundamental project, which is:
“…to self-consciously be what she would define as the center. And I see The Free Press tacking back and forth around that…The publication is a little bit, to me, like the old New Republic, doing things they used to do…”
This earlier political “center” was indeed nicely encapsulated by The New Republic, the most influential Zionist magazine in America until 2012, which counts among its alumni (and author of dubious articles for the magazine) David Samuels, Weiss’s mentor, and which was co-owned and “advised” at the end of its Zionist run by Gerry Cardinale. The New Republic featured memorable debates about hot button cultural topics: gay marriage, race, multiculturalism, and the related issue of speech on campuses. What The New Republic did not feature was any real debates about structures or power, specifically the American military-corporate complex’s expansions at home and abroad during that decade, for which The New Republic regularly provided ardent and ferociously ideological support. Under Weiss, The Free Press practices a version of The New Republic’s approach. As I reported for the Libertarian Institute in August, its coverage is shaped around three pillars (anti-progressivism, pro-Zionism, pro-corporatism) favored by like-minded institutions like the Manhattan Institute, funded by consortium of mostly Zionist donors led by Paul Singer. Questions about constitutionalism, or democracy, or empire don’t feature in its agenda.
One example of how this content might look under the aegis of a nominally “nonpartisan” network like CBS, as opposed to a more gloves-off “magazine of ideas” like The Free Press or The New Republic, is a recent New York Times op-ed by one of Weiss’s Free Press writers: former acting head of the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Southern District Danielle Sassoon, whose husband, Adam Katz, is a former longtime employee of Paul Singer’s. In this op-ed, Sassoon, an ardent Zionist, nominally discusses the lessons law students might take from her experience contesting the Trump Administration’s directives to prosecutors. But the article’s actual content veers in a starkly different direction: toward criticisms of universities purportedly favoring students who “oppose Israel’s war in Gaza” over other students who support it. Under the aegis of a straightforward, high-minded argument about law or speech, in other words, a very different geopolitical aim is being smuggled in—and other questions, about concentration of power or the creation of networks of influence, are being left completely off the table.
And CBS News, though it’s the most talked-about site of the Ellisons’ Paramount Skydance takeover, is not the end of the Ellisons’ media power bid to control information—not nearly. Paramount Skydance encompasses, among other properties, Paramount Motion Pictures, Paramount + Streaming, FuboTV, PlutoTV, BET Media, Nickelodeon, MTV, and Showtime. And the Ellisons’ empire will likely encompass more besides. In mid-October, news broke that David Ellison was planning to bid for Warner Brothers Discovery, the owner of Warner Brothers, HBO, and CNN, whose president and CEO, David Zaslav, is also an ardent Zionist. The opportunities for propagandizing via these many labels are vast—and, just as Weiss has earlier models to draw on in her remaking of CBS, a model of what this Hollywood propagandizing might look like already exists as well.
Namely, since the early 2000s, under owners like the Redstones whose loyalties are to Zionism and America’s empire, Hollywood studios have made a small fortune producing mainstream and “high-brow” content that justifies the very Global War on Terror that is a key part of maintaining Zionism and empire—often with input from the CIA. Among the most famous of this content is Showtime’s Homeland; and the Warner Brothers-distributed American Sniper. Most propagandistic is Zero Dark Thirty, an unapologetic apologia for the CIA’s “gloves-off” tactics in the Global War on Terror which was produced by Annapurna Pictures, whose founder and CEO is Megan Ellison, Larry Ellison’s daughter and David Ellison’s sister. Under an Ellison media hegemony, expect much more of this, from many more sources, at a much faster pace. Finally, add to these media products Ellison’s stake in TikTok, and the outlines of a sprawling empire of information and persuasion begins to take shape—one which will be accessible and accessed at one time or other by most Americans, whose views of the world it will inevitably affect.
Ellison Colonizes Higher Education via Oxford
Even as Ellison Jr. was closing in on securing the family’s (and Zionism’s) place in American media, Ellison Sr. was focusing on securing the family’s place in education via investing in Oxford University—based on the advice of a familiar Zionist player. This player is Tony Blair, the former British prime minister who, along with Rupert Murdoch, was most responsible for bringing Britain into the “coalition of the willing” to invade Iraq. That invasion, as testified to by journalists in close contact with White House machinations at the time, had a pro-Zionist intent to isolate Iran, secure Iraqi and then Iranian oil for America, and leave Israel, America’s closest ally, as the sole regional hegemon in the Middle East. When the project spectacularly failed, Blair bounced back via a post-prime ministerial role. He devoted himself to pursuing “peace” between Palestine and Israel on behalf of America and Britain, largely via “modernization projects” in the West Bank and Gaza. And it is Blair whom Donald Trump, in consultation with Jared Kushner, has recently selected to carry off the “raze-and-rebuild” of Gaza that is a key part of what I investigated for the Libertarian Institute in May: Trump’s latter-day project of expanding America’s hegemony in the Middle East without risking U.S. troops but, again, with Israel the linchpin of empire.
In this light, Blair’s role as the key advisor to Ellison’s Oxford project is, to say the least, telling.
To read the second half of this report, go to The Libertarian Institute.
Photo by Chensiyuan under the terms of the linked license.