Miguel Ruíz
Launched in 2017 by the private Chinese company ByteDance, TikTok quickly became one of the most important social networks on the planet.
By early this year, it had 1.6 billion active users, more than half of them outside China, of whom an estimated 170 million are North American; 1-in-5 people in the U.S. get their news from this network, 4-in-10 among the 18-29 age group.
Today, it is the fastest-growing platform among the younger segments of the global population.
The U.S. government has waged a long battle to force ByteDance to sell the U.S. branch of TikTok to a group of “domestic” capitalists, citing national security concerns and threatening to ban the platform in the U.S. if the deal did not go through.
On Sept. 25, the White House announced the terms under which the transaction would take place through an executive order signed by President Donald Trump, “Save TikTok by Protecting National Security.”
According to the order, the app in the US.
“… will be majority-owned and controlled by U.S. persons and will no longer be controlled by any foreign adversary, as ByteDance Ltd. and its affiliates will own less than 20% of the entity, with the remainder held by certain investors.”
Who are these mysterious “certain investors” that the executive order does not directly mention?
None other than a consortium led by the giant Texas-based company Oracle, which already stored TikTok data in the U.S. Its main shareholder is an 81-year-old American tycoon who, unlike Elon Musk, is relatively unknown to the public: Larry Ellison.
Ellison, in addition to being the new owner, would also take on key roles in managing security, data and algorithm auditing. In a nutshell, he will be the new boss of the vertical video platform in the United States, a company valued at $14 billion.
But perhaps the most relevant aspect of the case is not the amount of the transaction, but its long-term implications for power.
As a B.B.C. article states, “Investors will control the algorithm that powers the U.S. version of TikTok, and Americans will occupy six of the seven seats on the board of directors that will oversee it.”
Larry Ellison’s Geopolitical Relevance
What is admitted need not be proved, as the old adage goes. The day after the announcement, before an audience of podcasters and TikTokers at the Israeli consulate in New York, a blunt Benjamin Netanyahu declared: “Weapons change over time; the most important ones are social media.”
The Israeli prime minister said the purchase of TikTok “is the most important purchase being made right now.”
It had been preceded a month earlier by the appointment of Erica Mindel, a U.S. citizen and former Israeli military instructor, as the company’s new director of public policy for hate speech.
So did Israel buy TikTok? It depends on how you look at it. The key lies with Larry Ellison and his ties to the genocidal state.
As the owner of Oracle — cloud applications, databases and servers, with 160,000 employees around the globe — he is currently the second richest person on the planet (behind only Elon Musk), with a fortune valued at $350 billion, according to Forbes.
He lives on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, which he bought in 2012 for $300 million; he is a shareholder in X and Tesla; he owns almost 50 percent of the media giant Paramount-Skydance (including CBS), valued at $28 billion. Forbes writes that “Ellison never finished college. He started out creating databases for the C.I.A.”
His trusted business partner: Safra Catz, Oracle’s CEO since 2014, born in Israel and, like Ellison, a personal friend of Netanyahu. [Reportedly] a few months before the start of the genocidal war in Gaza, Catz met with Netanyahu to discuss the expansion of Oracle’s projects in the Israeli-occupied territories.
That was not an isolated incident. The close relationship between the new owner of TikTok and Israel goes back a long way, so much so that on one occasion Ellison even offered Netanyahu a seat on Oracle’s board of directors.
According to data provided by the BDS Movement, in 2019, Oracle leased an underground data center in Har Hotzvim, Jerusalem, to provide Israeli banks, health funds and military forces with AI processing and information storage service.
In 2021, it became the first multinational technology company to sell cloud services to Israel within the occupied territories.
In 2022, it hosted soldiers and software developers from the Israeli army’s C41 Corp. to learn how to use Oracle’s cloud for military purposes.
It is no coincidence that Catz, Oracle’s CEO, states that “for employees, it’s clear: if you’re not pro-U.S. or pro-Israel, don’t work here.”
Nor is it surprising that some of her employees commented to The Intercept that “the atmosphere is horrible, people are terrified to even mention Palestine.” According to the same source, as soon as Israel’s military retaliation in Gaza began in October 2023, Catz demanded that the inscription “Oracle Stands with Israel” appear on all company screens in more than 180 countries.
In the same context of the aggression against Palestinians in Gaza, Oracle developed the “Words of Iron” project, in collaboration with Israeli ministries, “to help the country elevate pro-Israel content and counter critical narratives on TikTok, Instagram and Twitter.”
In other words, a weapon at the service of propaganda, in that theater of operations that has now become fundamental, as Netanyahu himself knows: cognitive warfare.
The Intercept also reports that a year ago, Oracle partnered with one of Israel’s largest defense companies, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, on an AI project to provide “fighters with rapid, actionable information on the battlefield.” In other words, war on the ground.
Trump as Media Emperor
However close Ellison’s relations with the state of Israel and its army may be (he has also been a major donor to the U.S. organization Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF), which channels millions of dollars to the soldiers of that country) it would have been very difficult for his company to win the approval of the Trump administration if its owner were not close to the president of the United States himself.
After many years of donating to both parties but closer to the Democrats — an admirer of former President Bill Clinton, disenchanted with Barack Obama — Ellison’s balance began to shift toward the Republican side, especially its more radical wing.
In 2016, he donated a significant sum to Marco Rubio in the Republican primaries and, according to Wired, later became a “reliable donor and fundraiser for the Republican Party during the 2020 and 2024 cycles,” which allowed him to become very close to Trump.
Although perhaps somewhat exaggerated, one of Trump’s advisers interviewed by that website referred to the Oracle owner as “the shadow president of the United States.”
In any case, what is certain is that Netanyahu and Trump’s personal friend will not be satisfied with his latest acquisition from the Chinese.
The U.S. media have been reporting in recent weeks that the Ellisons, Larry and his son/heir David, are going for more. They now have their sights set on the acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery — which includes CNN.
According to the national media watchdog organization FAIR, if the sale goes through, it would “create an unprecedented level of media consolidation” in the history of global media, including powerful news channels, film production companies, cable television … to which must be added control over TikTok.
The danger of hyper-concentration of media power has been pointed out by various actors. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren warned that regulatory agencies should block the potential merger “because it is a dangerous concentration of power.”
Or, as a professor of digital sociology, Steven Buckley, points out: “It is not a sign of a healthy democracy when billionaires buy up all the cultural consumption media.”
For now, regardless of whether this latest move by the Ellison clan comes to fruition, his purchase of TikTok, blessed by the Trump-Netanyahu duo, once again sets off alarm bells regarding the marriage of economic, geopolitical, and military interests; just at a time when global awareness seems to be awakening to the urgent need to stop the war machines of Israel and the United States.
