Oracle billionaire CEO Larry Ellison is aggressively moving into media and military contracting to consolidate his power in the Trump 2.0 era.
Larry Ellison’s ambitions have been known in Silicon Valley for a long time, as this 2003 biography’s title reveals:
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) August 11, 2025
If you don’t have time to read a full book but want to learn more about Larry Ellison, you might want to skim this picture-heavy biography of Larry Ellison from Yahoo Finance, looks like they converted a click-heavy slideshow into an easy scroll and scan.
But in the Trump 2.0 era, it’s not enough to be a tech titan, Ellison’s moved from databases into media, AI, and military tech, and has some media outlets calling him America’s most powerful man.
I’ve written previously about the Ellison family’s take over of Paramount.
Today another shoe dropped in that drama as The Ultimate Fighting Championship announced that Paramount had acquired the exclusive streaming rights for the mixed martial arts promotion in a multi-billion dollar deal that exceeded the most optimistic expectations for the price of that deal.
In fact the $7.7B value of the deal exceeds Paramounts market cap by $1.1 billion.
The NYT has background on the deal:
Paramount announced Monday morning that it had struck a seven-year $7.7 billion deal to claim exclusive streaming and broadcast rights in the United States for the Ultimate Fighting Championship. The deal will go into effect next year.
…
The new deal will replace a yearslong arrangement between U.F.C. and ESPN, and effectively doubles the total fee the sport will take in. ESPN currently pays roughly $550 million a year for U.F.C. coverage.Paramount and TKO said that the seven-year deal has an average yearly value of $1.1 billion, though “the contract’s payment schedule is weighted more toward the back end of the deal.”
…
Mr. Trump has been a fan of the sport for years, and the U.F.C. chief executive, Dana White, is a close ally. The president was spotted at a U.F.C. fight in April, sitting near Mr. Ellison as well as Ari Emanuel, the chief executive of TKO.Mr. Trump has also said that he wants to stage a U.F.C. fight on the White House grounds next year, around the July 4 holiday. Mr. Emanuel and Mr. Shapiro confirmed in an interview the likelihood of the fight, which would be streamed on Paramount+ and possibly broadcast on CBS.
Why did the Ellison’s overpay for the UFC’s streaming rights?
Simple, the UFC’s owner, Hollywood super agent, Ari Emanuel helped them acquire Paramount in what The New York Times called “one of the most tortured deals the media sector has seen in years.”
Emanuel voiced his support of the deal in May, 2024 at what The Financial Times called “a precarious moment for Ellison’s bid.”
More recently, Emanuel hosted President Trump and David Ellison cageside at two UFC events where the POTUS and the nepo-baby media mogul were seen talking animatedly and at one point Emanuel even stepped in, apparently to calm the pair and smooth things over.
And just in case anyone thought that young David Ellison was actually in charge, information has come to light showing who will actually control Paramount:
a new document filed with the Federal Communications Commission indicates that his father — Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle — will be the real power behind the throne, replacing Shari Redstone as the company’s most influential shareholder.
The document, obtained by The New York Times, lists Larry Ellison at the top of an organizational chart of the companies that will acquire the majority of Paramount’s voting interest currently owned by Ms. Redstone.
The document, part of an application to the Federal Communications Commission to transfer control of Paramount’s TV stations, lays out the complex web of companies that will acquire Ms. Redstone’s controlling stake. Pinnacle Media, the Ellison family investment vehicle, will own 77.5 percent of the voting interest currently owned by Ms. Redstone, according to the document. The rest will go to an entity affiliated with RedBird Capital Partners, which backs Skydance.
…
“Maybe Larry Ellison will give David free rein,” said Brian Quinn, a professor at Boston College Law School. “Perhaps, Larry will call all the shots, or maybe just the big shots. We just don’t know. It seems, however, that Larry Ellison will have ultimate control.”
The only mystery in this deal is why the Ellisons needed help with Trump given Larry’s early and hearty support for the Donald’s presidential aspirations:
Larry Ellison’s journey to this level of wealth and power—both political and cultural—would not have happened had he not solidified his relationship with Trump long before any of these other tech CEOs came to embrace him. (Peter Thiel is perhaps the sole exception here.) After Donald Trump was first elected president in 2016, Oracle CEO Safra Catz joined the executive committee for Trump’s transition team and occasionally advised him during that first term, while still working with Ellison. In November 2020, after Ellison’s prior fundraisers failed to boost Trump to reelection, the tech titan joined a group call with Sean Hannity and Sen. Lindsey Graham, among others, to discuss how to contest the election results. After the Jan. 6 insurrection, Oracle’s political action committee pledged to no longer back the politicians who’d objected to the Electoral College’s certification of Biden’s victory—only to quickly turn on that promise during the 2022 midterms, donating to election deniers like Reps. Steve Scalise, Jim Banks, Jim Jordan, Ralph Norman, and Darrell Issa. That same year, Ellison also invested in Musk’s far-right Twitter takeover.
The multibillionaire simultaneously began positioning himself closer to Mar-a-Lago, investing amply in a small island town close to Trump’s Florida residence and transforming it into a hub for the country’s wealthiest to congregate. As such, although he initially backed Sen. Tim Scott for the 2024 GOP nomination, it was easy for Ellison to begin dining with Trump again as the ex-president’s candidacy seemed assured—and for Oracle to begin working with the Heritage Foundation to compile a database of potential Trump appointees who’d be unfailingly loyal. Larry Ellison joined the Silicon Valley adviser army that descended upon Mar-a-Lago when Trump won reelection, then went on to cheer Musk’s DOGE rampage and propose that all “national data” be put into a singular database that would feed an A.I. model—a vision that may be in reach thanks to the action plan, whose data-concentration goals would build upon DOGE’s addition of A.I. to various government functions.
Now, just six months into Trump’s term, Ellison has procured for himself a sweeping empire, ruling over acres’ worth of A.I. infrastructure, gaining a megasized media arm for himself via Paramount-Skydance, potentially winning another powerful media apparatus with TikTok, and seeing his own ideologies and goals reflected by a friendly White House. The Trump 2.0 era has been spectacular for “one rich asshole called Larry Ellison”—mostly because he’s done so much to shape it.
To understand the 80-year-old Larry Ellison, it’s worthwhile to grasp Oracle’s place in the tech wars. Basically, they’re a 90’s era company that fell behind by the 2010s and seized on AI and Large Language Models as a way of staying relevant. From Not Boring:
by the 2010’s Oracle looked to be losing. After leading the way in enterprise databases and integrated software for years, competing fiercely for market share, Oracle missed three successive waves in computing: the internet, mobile, and finally, the cloud.
While Oracle was able to continue earning money from its extensive enterprise and government contracts which were locked in for years, and was able to hang on to relevance by using its distributional advantage with its existing customers to ship Oracle versions of emerging platforms and software, by 2016 things looked pretty grim. Oracle had ceded much of cloud to AWS, and Microsoft had started to muscle in with its own customer relationships to Fortune 500s and governments.
While still a titan, Oracle’s lack of innovation seemed to predict a steady slide into irrelevance. Yet over the last few years, the company has made a stunning comeback, somehow indispensable to the biggest players.
The straightforward business reason is that Oracle effectively positioned itself through massive investment in GPU datacenters to become one of the go-to players for training large language models, especially among its government and large enterprise customer base. The early miss on cloud also turned out to be an advantage, as AWS, Microsoft, and Google chose Oracle as a neutral service provider to help run their AI-focused datacenters.
The New York Times has also reported on Larry Ellison and his vision for the future:
Mr. Ellison has recently been trying to make the world better by pushing for a surveillance society. There would be cameras everywhere, with every movement analyzed by A.I.
“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on,” he told Oracle investors last fall. “It’s unimpeachable.”
Also on Mr. Ellison’s to-do list is combining thousands of databases into one enormous electronic repository, which can be mined by A.I. That will cure diseases and fix everything else, he told Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, at a symposium on reinventing government held in Dubai in February.
“I think this will make for a happier citizenry,” Mr. Ellison, who appeared via video, told Mr. Blair.
To realize his most benevolent vision for mankind, Larry Ellison and Oracle have agreed to spend $40 billion on Nvidia chips for OpenAI’s data centers as part of the so-called Stargate project that was announced by President Trump himself at the White House.
Although, The Information reported that this deal might be more than a little overhyped:
Stargate—an up to $500 billion venture announced by OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle to build data centers for artificial intellegence—is “not formed yet,” Oracle CEO Safra Catz told investors Wednesday.
When Catz was asked by investors whether Oracle’s projections for a 70% growth rate in its cloud computing unit included contracts with Stargate, she didn’t answer the question directly, but hinted that they did not.
Oracle has struck deals with OpenAI to rent out Nvidia graphics processing units outside of Stargate. “We work with OpenAI,” Catz said. “Those are still small numbers in the scheme of everything else we’re doing, but it will ultimately be bigger.”
On Wednesday Oracle told investors that its remaining performance obligations, or contracts it signed but can’t fulfill due to supply constraints, total $138 billion. It’s unclear what time horizon those contracts cover, since Oracle’s cloud unit generated just $10 billion in the year ended in May. But Oracle founder Larry Ellison said on the call that if “Stargate turns out to be everything that is advertised,” the $138 billion in future contracts would be “understated.”
One thing that isn’t overhyped is Oracle’s relationship with Israel:
Oracle Corporation announced that “Oracle stands with Israel” on the front page of their website alongside an image of the State of Israel’s flag, a pledge of total support for the country’s government and defense establishment, all ending with “#istandwithisrael.” Oracle commits most of their direct support to Magen David Adom (MDA), an emergency response organization in Israel and Israeli-occupied areas, which human rights watchdog groups have long criticized.
The homepage promises that the corporation “will match our employee contributions — with no limit — to this vital organization,” a commitment on top of the $1 million that Oracle donated in October 2023.
However, the corporation’s financial commitment to the State of Israel began before October.
In 2021, Oracle became the first multinational tech company to offer cloud services in Israel when they established a $319 million underground center in Jerusalem hosting military, government, banking, and business data. Later that year, other tech giants Google and Amazon followed suit with specialized cloud services for the Israeli government and military.
In January 2024, Oracle CEO Safra Catz visited with right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss plans for a second Oracle cloud center in the country. Catz has a history of collaboration with far-right leadership, as she served on Donald Trump’s presidential transition advisory team in 2016, a partnership that has since led to multi-million dollar deals between Oracle and the United States government. Oracle now hosts heavily guarded information for the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Pentagon.
Of course, in the current era, even Larry Ellison needed the help of key Trump insiders to land the big deal with Israel, from 2021:
In late June, in the midst of the hot and sticky Israeli summer, an elegantly dressed American citizen landed at Ben Gurion Airport. It is doubtful whether his almost generic Israeli name, Ezra Cohen, evoked any curiosity among the staff of the Sheraton Hotel in Tel Aviv where he stayed and met with journalists. However, the 35-year-old who may look like a tourist who came to do some business and some lying around on the beach, is none other than the former Acting U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence during the Trump Administration.
Cohen, a former member of the American intelligence community, was called to Israel to carry out a special and sensitive task on behalf of the American software giant Oracle – disqualifying Google and Amazon, its competitors, from winning Israel’s cloud tender, the Nimbus project. Not only is this task worth a lot of money, NIS 4 billion ($1.2 billion) in the project’s first phase and another NIS 1-1.5 billion ($300-$500 million) annually, but it also provides strategic access to a comprehensive cloud infrastructure that provides services to the IDF, the Ministry of Defense and government ministries.
Cohen was just one of the heavy hitters that Oracle sent to Israel to apply pressure. Shortly after he arrived in Israel and asked to meet with journalists, in early July, Safra Catz, the CEO of Oracle, followed in his footsteps. “Larry Ellison (Oracle founder) and I are committed to Israel publicly and give from our time for it,” she said to the journalists who came to meet her. Offhandedly, she referred to Oracle’s loss in the tender saying “It is very difficult to understand the decision, perhaps they did not have all the relevant information before them.”
Never fear, the deal was done and the data center opened in 2021 and is now working on a second which will be built nine floors underground. The first data center was five floors underground and I wonder if it survived Israel’s 12 Day War with Iran:
The company’s Jerusalem data center is housed in a 14,000 sqm (460,000 sq ft) bunker located below five parking levels and a 17-story building in Jerusalem’s Har Hotzvim tech hub. Constructed by Bynet Data Communications, the facility extends over four floors at a depth of 50 meters (160 feet) below ground level.
Oracle is also frequently mentioned as a likely American buyer for TikTok, if President Trump ever succeeds in bullying the company into selling and Oracle has made its approach to information hygiene very clear, should it acquire the short-form video titan:
While the campaign against TikTok was led by China hawks in Washington, it was the ire of pro-Israel activists that perhaps best explains why Oracle is such a natural choice to take over the social media app.
The campaign to ban the app kicked into high gear after Hamas’s October 7 attack against Israel. The timing spurred talk that the push for a ban wasn’t just about American national security, but Israel’s too. Politicians even tied their campaigns against TikTok to alleged Hamas propaganda being hosted on the platform.
Oracle, which had already taken control of some of TikTok’s day-to-day operations, had taken a firm pro-Israel stance and, according to an Intercept investigation, clamped down on pro-Palestine activism inside the company.
Last November, Israeli American Oracle CEO Safra Catz told an Israeli business news outlet, “For employees, it’s clear: if you’re not for America or Israel, don’t work here—this is a free country.”
Collaborations between the company and Israeli government agencies have been wide-ranging, encompassing everything from direct technology work with the military to software intended to help Israel with public relations — including, according to internal company messages, on social media platforms like TikTok.
The same article hinted at more Oracle-Israel joint projects in service of Ellison’s vision for making the world better:
Not all of Oracle’s work in Israel, though, is publicized. Even as it announced its cloud computing deal, Oracle was working on a four-year highly confidential project with the Israeli Air Force called “Project Menta,” according to screenshots of Slack postings obtained by The Intercept. (Neither Oracle nor the Israeli Ministry of Defense responded to requests for comment.)
Project Menta, which was previously undisclosed, has allowed Israel’s air force to do a “bunch of important military stuff that we can’t share with you,” Shimon Levy, head of communications at Oracle Israel, wrote to colleagues on Slack in December 2021, according to three internal sources. Levy appended a sword emoji to his message.
In 2022, Levy also announced in the same channel that the Israeli military’s Unit 81 — essentially a technology solutions division housed within the country’s intelligence apparatus — was in the final stage of a three-year program with Oracle to expedite procurement by allowing every soldier to make their own military purchase requests.
That same year, Oracle hosted a hackathon with the Israeli military to “develop technical solutions to acute social challenges.”
Oracle is also deeply entangled in the UK’s info-security sphere per Mintpress News:
In 2020, software giant Oracle won a gigantic contract with the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) to provide it with cloud infrastructure, digital assistance, data visualization software, mobile hub and development tools. The military is far from the only British institution entrusting its most sensitive data to the Texas-based firm, however. The Home Office, Office of National Statistics and National Health Service, among others, also rely on Oracle databases to function.
MintPress also has some insights into how Oracle cut its deal with Britain:
For years before signing the MoD agreement, Oracle founder Larry Ellison had been ingratiating himself with the British establishment, employing all manner of well-connected individuals at his foundation. Among these included media executive and father-in-law of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Matthew Symonds, who earned over $600,000 per year as the executive director of the Larry Ellison Foundation. Richard Meredith, a longtime director of the U.K.’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, was also snapped up at a similar salary to become deputy executive director.
Many other well-connected British government officials, including Vel Gnanendran, went straight from the Larry Ellison Foundation into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and worked there at the time that the body signed off on the lucrative Oracle contracts. For years, the Larry Ellison Foundation also bankrolled the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, the former U.K. prime minister’s new political project.
Yet, just after as the partnership with the Ministry of Defence was secured, Ellison abruptly shut down his foundation, prompting speculation that it had fulfilled its purpose.
And in case you were worried that Oracle wasn’t hooked up enough, MintPress also related the company’s longstanding relationship with the CIA:
This should be of concern to everyone, as Oracle itself started off as a project for the Central Intelligence Agency. Indeed, Ellison named his company after Project Oracle, a 1970s CIA operation he worked on.
“Our very first customer was the Central Intelligence Agency,” Ellison boasted, telling the story of how, in 1977, the CIA commissioned his firm to build them a database. From there, Ellison immediately began pitching to other wings of the national security state, and within months had secured contracts with Navy Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence and the NSA. The bottomless pit of money available for the military has helped turn Oracle from a tiny operation to a $46 billion dollar per year behemoth.
One of Oracle’s largest deals came in 2020, when it was part of a consortium that won a 15-year contract with the CIA and the other 16 U.S. intelligence agencies said to be with tens of billions of dollars.
Part of the reason the CIA trusts Oracle is that the company’s upper echelons are filled with ex-CIA executives. A case in point is former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who was appointed to the company’s board in 2015. David Carney, who spent 32 years at the agency, rising to become its third-in-command, also joined Oracle, heading up its information assurance center.
Truly Larry Ellison is working very hard to realize his vision for a better world and what a vision it is.
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jeez.
these people!
combine this to the very long exegesis on Peter Thiel Thought from this morning’s Links…
and, even though i try to remove his incessant posts from my X feed…i get daily doses of Musk Thought, too.
and some people i follow are forever passing along whatever mad ramblings by that andreeson guy.
lol.
they’re actually building the Core Worlds from Firefly…and me without a brown coat…
I’m more inclined to believe they’re Mirandizing Earth.
This all sounds bad but is Ellison really very different from the people that were already running CBS and the other networks? It’s not as though any branch of the MSM has shown enthusiasm for taking on genocide.
Of course if one assumes that Trump is the tip of the fascist spear (and the authoritarian Biden admin was not) then Ellison is worse. But it’s a little late to be worrying about our transition from democracy to oligarchy. Guess we will see if the latest spurt of Silicon Valley gradiosity is a bubble that will pop. Here’s betting that it does. Getting rid of Trump may be harder.
Ellison is different from the previous owners of Paramount in multiple ways.
1. Ellison was already about 500x wealthier than Shari Redstone, previous owner of Paramount.
2. Oracle was already a major player in surveillance, databases, AI, and military tech.
3. Paramount under the Ellison’s leadership is already much more amenable to changing news coverage to please Trump than Paramount had been until nearly the very end of Redstone’s tenure.
4. Redstone is just as strong a Zionist as the Ellisons.
5. Paramount under Redstone was a weak player among major Hollywood studios/media companies. Under the Ellisons, Paramount will have the kind of financial backing only YouTube enjoys, far more than even Netflix.
I’d say number 4 (no change) is most significant news wise. Also the “Tiffany network” (CBS) has come a long way down since that other rich guy Ted Turner wanted to buy it decades ago. Nielsen says the OTA networks are down to 20 percent share of entertainment viewers and news shows likely are the same.
As for Paramount it’s now just a name plate. Last story I saw said their famous lot may be up for sale.
Not pooh poohing your welcome article but think my question is legit.
I think our difference is you’re centering CBS as the most important thing when it’s a secondary or tertiary factor here.
The point of the piece was oligarch Larry Ellison and Paramount is just another arrow in his quiver.
He’ll also own the Star Trek franchise, which boils my blood. Not that it’s been great lately, but there’s a legacy of free-thinking creative minds behind it.
Mr. Ellison has recently been trying to make the world better by pushing for a surveillance society. There would be cameras everywhere, with every movement analyzed by A.I.
“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on,” he told Oracle investors last fall. “It’s unimpeachable.”
Seems to me that citizens should be the ones controlling the cameras, recording everything “our” elected officials do, 24/7. But something tells me that it isn’t going to work out that way.
The nouveau-riche of Silicon Valley (such as the “Paypal Mafia”) get all the attention but Ellison is truly in a class of his own when it comes to sleaze. It’s so perfect that his swan song is in this administration with all the horrible events ongoing. Truly it could not have been plotted out better by scriptwriters.
Regarding this offhand comment by Nat,
The first data center was five floors underground and I wonder if it survived Israel’s 12 Day War with Iran
It survived.
thanks for the info. Sorry to hear that.
It will be interesting to see what happens to people like Larry Ellison when this bubble implodes. Anyone who even glances at economic history can see that capitalism has a recurring habit of blowing up bubbles, even really BIG ones. What interests me so much about this one is that when the bubble pops, as it will, there really aren’t much for real world capital investments to remain behind.
For example, in the post American Civil War era a massive railroad bubble was created and when it burst, lots of people lost their savings as investors in RR stocks and bonds, but the actual RR tracks and trains remained behind as useful and productive capital for society. The popping of that bubble created what was originally called the great depression and has since been renamed the Long Depression as it was about 20 years before the US economy finally regained its foot (on the early stages of the next bubble).
During the DotCom bubble there were huge investments in fiber optics and network build out that remained after that bubble burst. And even though thousands of Americans suffered when the housing bubble popped in 2007/08, the homes built didn’t disappear.
All that said… I’m not sure what useful capital is going to be left behind when the AI – Silicon Valley – Crypto bubble pops. It would be one thing if AI was actually useful relative to its energy consumption and reliable outputs, but I’m 99% sure that is not the case. AI is purely an accounting fraud from my perspective. Will we have productive uses for all the data centers built?
My suspicion is that not only will we wipe out the wealth of 1,000’s of Americans (if not 10’s of thousands or a few million), but we wont have anything of use to show for it.
Ominous. You mention that the internet has a physical infrastructure which was left behind when its bubble burst, and you mention data centers. I think we have a good bit of an answer to the question of what will be left behind, as the government subsidizes or otherwise facilitates their creation, and incorporates AI into its own functions. The dystopian possibility is of a totally incompetent techno-totalitarian surveillance state, propping up the tech and energy sectors through taxpayer money. There’s a certain plausibility to it, as fossil fuels and the intellectual property at the root of AI are, for the time being, among the only remaining blue chip US products.
We shouldn’t discount the possibility of the continued dominance of AI just because it doesn’t really work. Despite not being a reliable or ethical tool for decision making, it fulfills crucial economic functions, like the aforementioned effects on tech writ large and energy, proletarianizing professionals, and its bouyant effects on the all-important stock market. For that last reason alone, policymakers are sure at the least to make the bubble last as long, or be as large, as they can.
Should it both collapse and have to be shelved as a technology, if, say, its output, trained by itself, becomes really untenable for business or government use, we’ll be left with the means to store a lot of data, and that raw fixed capital itself will be a strong pull to find some use for it; this leads me back to its potential for mass surveillance, predictive policing, &c. The government could bail out our intrepid innovators by buying all of the physical infrastructure, and they’d have some idea of what to do with it.
Yea I tend to think the second-order effects and utility of LLMs/AI for surveillance and mass targeting will make it stick around even if some of the corporate players implode.
We won’t be able to afford the energy to run data centers.
This is a very good point and Ed Zitron touched on it in his latest post. Those GPUs are going to age out quickly and nobody is going to be able to do anything with them other than recycle the rare earths. I’d lol but this is frivolous destruction of wealth, that rightly belongs to labor.
Everything you mention is true, but I think it’s even worse than that: the intertwining of government finance and crypto, via stable coins like Tether as increasingly large holders of Treasury debt, suggests that a big crypto sell-off would directly affect the bond market, and the stability of the US in general.
I get the impression that Bitcoin is controlled by a sufficiently small number of Whales that they could perhaps maintain its inflated price, but if the holders of all those other bulls*#^ crypto “assets” get spooked, look out below…
“Mr. Trump has also said that he wants to stage a U.F.C. fight on the White House grounds next year, around the July 4 holiday. Mr. Emanuel and Mr. Shapiro confirmed in an interview the likelihood of the fight, which would be streamed on Paramount+ and possibly broadcast on CBS.”
Yet more evidence of human devolution. Glorifying this kind of violence is just what we don’t need. But hey, if there’s a buck to be made….
Combat sports have been a part of Western mass culture at least since the mid-19th century. Muhammad Ali in the 1970s and Joe Louis in the 1940s became major cultural heroes because of their heroics in and out of the ring. It’s the cozy business relationship between Trump and the companies controlling the fights that is of concern not fight sports themselves.
People trying to knock each other senseless may have a long history, but it would seem that if we choose to survive as a species, finding alternatives to cage matches might be one place to start. The fact that Trump is involved makes the whole spectacle even worse.
Western mass culture? The USA looks more like the (Holy) Roman Empire as each day passes, with all that portends for its future. Let The Games begin!
This post is the first to make sense of Paramount+ picking up the UFC. Thank you for that.
Two aspects of the sport were making the contract seem very shaky. One is that the fan base seems particularly dedicated to pirating streams as an extension of an F-U philosophy. (Alcohol may be involved.) The contract is being seeing as the death of pay-per-view.
Second, due to the nature of the sport (violent with one-on-one matchups), almost every card has cancellations due to injuries, often with the good-to-go fighter being matched up with someone on short notice. This puts in variability which can be an advantage for the called-up fighter, as the other has been training for the particular match-up. If they were supposed to fight a wrestling specialist, and the new match is with a striker, all the meticulously trained responses can work against them. A main-card shift is usually considered a disaster. Team sports are much more resilient.
I cancelled ESPN+ about a month ago with the reason ‘UFC sucks’, so I’m taking credit for ESPN letting them go. The cards have sucked at times, scarcely a ranked fighter in sight, and the company President has an affiliation for certain fighters, tolerating failed drug tests and felonies, enough to credibly advance the possibility he’s been blackmailed. Which is why the Paramount pickup made no sense, until your post put it together.
Thanks. I’ve been expecting Paramount to make an offer for the UFC media rights as a reward for Ari Emanuel helping so much with the merger but I really didn’t expect them to outright win the bidding. I suspect that Netflix and Disney/ESPN were looking at the business fundamentals and couldn’t justify coming anywhere close to where Paramount ended up.
This isn’t a business deal per se, it’s a payoff for lobbying and a data play.
That wouldn’t be the Ari Emanuel who is a brother or Rahm? Yes, I think so.
It is indeed. I wrote more about their relationship here: Rahm Emanuel’s Kayfabe Candidacy
My humble opinion but some of the best sports based films are about boxing. No I am not using the Rocky films or Creed films as my benchmark, FWIW.
Cinderella Man is such a great story and lends itself to that timeless tale of true riches to rags in the Depression, and somehow finds work only to later find again his passion for his craft, and a small window for the fighter to have his chance at redemption. Added that the book authored by Jeremy Schapp is a worthy read.
wasnt that one of the first gee whiz golly moments in Idiocracy?
i guess ima hafta go watch that again, if it hasnt been scrubbed as too prescient.
So, no feedback loops and no Trust.
That will work until it doesn’t, with a lot of pain.
Humans evolved to have soft nails, weak teeth, and thin skin– how’d we survive? Communcation and cooperation– both require trust.
Liars threaten our very survival.
Kropotkin wrote Mutual AId around 1902, in an attempt to counter the prevailing Social Darwinism with its “nature, red in tooth and claw” mentality.. Unfortunately, we don’t seem to have gotten the message.
My mind went into Fight Club mode. First rule, and second rule, I have thus broken. If someone here is unfamiliar with either the film version or the book I can highly encourage and recommend both. The film is directed by David Fincher, who was moving into “good then much better” mode after directing the Seven film a few years prior. Brad Pitt features in both of these films.
Larry Ellison and his offspring wielding a lot of money and clout. Them whose got the gold make the rules. There was a time not that long ago, when Larry Ellison seemed more interested in living a high lifestyle on the seas in his yacht.
It is interesting that Larry is being this energetic so late in life. Is he just trying to set up young David or is he planning on living a while longer to enjoy these triumphs?
Just an ‘I am not a psychologist but I watch a lot on tv’ thought here, but Larry has always struck me as narcissistic as Trump just with smart psychopathic tendencies. I doubt he has ever forgotten the smallest slight. So my guess is neither. My guess is that he is or will be teaching a whole lotta lessons to people who crossed him with this. That it sets David up to be an even bigger power center, if not the biggest, is just a bonus.
Ellison is supah big on funding longevity and anti-aging research, like so many other Silicon Valley billionaire freaks/monsters… a central aspect of his narcissism/megalomania.
Thank you for that bit of cheer. Yes, no matter what these narcissistic titans of industry do, or how much money they spend on chasing immortality, they are in the end…just mere mortals. The hands of time tick for us all.
Well, the trauma from engaging in UFC (hits to the head) is NOT the path to longevity. My head hurts from just watching the short snippets on ESPN. (The best way to physical longevity is through maintaining muscle mass (resistance training) , VO2 max (aerobic capacity) and a healthy diet/lifestyle. Good genetic makeup doesn’t hurt.) Larry Ellison is unlikely to follow this protocol.
Giving the Devil his due, Ellison looks very good for his age, though we can only imagine the regimen of blood bags, hyperbaric chambers, curated diets and all sorts of quackery he must subject himself to.