Larry Ellison

Larry Ellison (born 1944) co-founded Oracle in 1977 and built it into the database backbone of global business, serving as CEO for 37 years before becoming chairman and CTO. The AI boom gave the 80-year-old a second act: Oracle’s pivot to AI cloud infrastructure sent its stock soaring and, at points in 2025, made Ellison the richest person on Earth.

Stargate and the surveillance pitch

In January 2025 Ellison stood beside President Trump, Sam Altman, and SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son to announce Stargate, a plan to pour $500 billion into US AI data centers, with Oracle as a founding partner and OpenAI’s landlord for gigawatts of compute. Ellison touts AI’s benefits in cancer vaccines and agriculture — but his most-quoted AI vision came at a September 2024 Oracle analyst meeting, where he predicted AI systems would continuously monitor camera feeds from police body cams, doorbells, and drones, keeping both police and citizens honest because everything is recorded and reported.

Civil-liberties advocates heard a dystopia cheerfully priced as a product; the quote resurfaced constantly as Oracle took roles in the TikTok-US deal and in government data projects, and Ellison has separately argued that nations should unify their data — including citizens’ records — so AI can mine it. Supporters counter that Ellison was describing accountability, noting his prediction that AI supervision of police could prevent abuses. Few AI boosters have stated the technology’s panoptic endpoint so plainly, or with so little apparent worry.