(2025-10-10) The Ellisons Are Betatesting Big Brother

Matt Seybold: The Ellisons Are Beta-Testing Big Brother. In a kleptocracy, antitrust is not a tool for diluting monopoly power, but for concentrating it. During his first term, Donald Trump openly fantasized about using federal antitrust provisions to break up media conglomerates and tech companies he felt threatened by.

As Trump returns to power, his team now realizes that it is not the punishment provisions of U.S. antitrust law, but rather its implicit permission powers which the executive branch can wield far more effectively, and without the inconvenience of due process. Rather than trying to break up corporate monopolies they can’t control, why not create or expand ones they believe they can?

What the Trump administration’s antitrust agenda has underwritten is not so much a media conglomerate as a surveillance agency, and it is one which will likely persist, after the near-term political turmoil, whether as a parallel media infrastructure serving the jilted broligarchy or as the paragovernmental arm of a post-democratic dynasty.

The Paramount Skydance merger was bankrolled mostly by Larry Ellison, whose son (David Ellison) became CEO of the new company, the first in a series of related acquisitions by Ellison, his companies, and his co-investors. Most notably, besides The Free Press, Paramount is pursuing a merger with Warner Bros. Discovery (their closest competitor) and Ellison’s Oracle Corporation is taking the largest stake in the TikTok USA deal being brokered by Trump himself.

it will have taken Ellison less than six months to construct the second-largest media conglomerate in the U.S.

Tim Fries, a private equity principle and analyst, doesn’t regard what Ellison is building as a media conglomerate at all, but rather an “emerging AI-powered military industrial complex.”

II.

Students at Northwestern University got a peek at a Big Brother Beta upon returning to campus this Fall. As Nineth Kanieski Koso has been covering for The Daily Northwestern, the university changed the Student Code of Conduct over the summer to require a series of “bias training” videos allegedly aimed at combating Antisemitism and Islamophobia

I want to draw attention to the platform via which the videos are being delivered: Qualtrics XM.
Qualtrics XM is a Software As A Service (SaaS) platform (mayday, mayday) which markets heavily to colleges and universities. According to their website, Qualtrics XM is “trusted by over 1,200 Higher Education partners.” Qualtrics started primarily as a digital survey tool

in 2018, at the same time Qualtrics XM was launched, Qualtrics rebranded themselves as an “experience management company”

Silver Lake Partners, who took a $500 million stake in Qualtrics upon its IPO in 2021. That purchase qualified for a seat on Qualtrics’ board of directors, which would be occupied by Silver Lake’s current co-CEO, Egon Durban. Within two years, Durban would help convince his fellow board members to accept a leveraged buyout led by Silver Lake to take Qualtrics private again. By the Summer of 2023, Silver Lake owned outright.

Less than a year earlier, Durban had been booted from Twitter’s board under suspicion his allegiance to Elon Musk (who has a history of investing with Silver Lake) was in conflict with his fiduciary duty as a board member considering Musk’s purchase offer.

In addition to being a “longtime business associate and backer of Elon Musk,” as CNBC put it, Egon Durban has a reputation for working closely with one of Musk’s most prominent co-investors in the Twitter deal, Larry Ellison.
With Durban as face of the firm, Silver Lake has become the most extensive co-signer of the emergent Ellison Family Media Empire.

The connections between Ellison and Silver Lake go all the way back to the firm’s founding, by a former Oracle executive, David Roux, who once described Ellison as “a silver-backed gorilla alpha male.” Ellison was one of the first large investors in Silver Lake and permitted Roux and his partners to use his name when raising their first fund

After Silver Lake announced the leveraged buyout of video game developer, Electronic Arts (EA), early this month - what will be the largest private equity deal ever, with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner acting as handmaiden5 - Fries wrote in the The Tokenist, “In broader terms, EA’s acquisition should be understood as another step in media consolidation, spearheaded by Israeli-aligned Larry Ellison.”

more than any of EA’s wildly popular gaming franchises, Silver Lake and its co-investors likely covet its data-mining operations.

As an owner of both companies, Silver Lake is now positioned to synergize these surveillance operations, potentially to connect the unique identifiers of EA gamers to their student records.

III.

Fellow Oracle founder and venture capitalist, Kathryn Gould, reported in 2014 that she remembers Larry Ellison telling her, during the period they were working together in the early 1980s, that his favorite book was Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons (1934).

The Robber Barons is unflinching in its depiction of the federal spoils system, the municipal political machines, and the selective enforcement of labor and property law, financial regulation, and, at the turn of the century, antitrust.

Josephson concludes his history with a biting critique of Teddy Roosevelt’s idiosyncratic application of the Sherman Antitrust Act. While Roosevelt coveted the reputation of “trust-buster” in public feuds with J.P. Morgan and J.D. Rockefeller, the magnates who he tussled with in the press always managed to come away from their antitrust persecutions wealthier and more powerful. Josephson regards Roosevelt’s antitrust agenda as actually designed to defang labor union organizing and progressive factions in his own party, and simultaneously “conciliate the great industrialists.”

This sad history is something which should always be front of mind when antitrust is invoked by politicians, as it was earlier this week.

a quartet of GOP senators launched an oversight investigation on the basis of those thorny punishment powers. Were this investigation to lead to actual litigation, its purpose would ostensibly be to break the monopoly of private universities. According to these senators, a cabal of universities may be using “algorithmic collusion” to “maximize their profits or coordinate their pricing, financial aid, and admissions practices.”

Its most substantial revelation, at present, is that these Congressmen regard the aggregation, monetization, and instrumentalization of data across private equity portfolios as a foregone conclusion, as standard practice. It is not the data harvesters they are after. To revive Twain’s metaphor, they are quite content to harass the symptoms - university admissions - while leaving the disease carefully alone

IV.

In her column for the New York Times earlier this week, Tressie McMillan Cottom synthesized so much of what has been happening in the weeks since the Paramount Skydance merger laid the foundation for the Ellison Family Media Empire

It has been tempting for many to compare the Ellisons to the Rupert Murdochs.

What has emerged more recently is not simply partisan journalism, but parallel journalism

For parallel journalism, consumer appeal ceases to matter altogether. The outlet imitates existing new organizations, but operates exclusively as a polished publicity machine for the moneyed interests which support it. Any revenue generated by subscriptions or advertising is incidental

The Free Press was an archetypal parallel journalism publication. But what Cottom recognizes is that the Ellisons are positioning themselves to move not only past partisanship, but also potentially past parallel media, to paragovernmentality, providing a president who already possesses the “direct coercive power of the state” with, as she puts it, “indirect power over communication institutions” in every digital mass media form

the models for the Ellison Family Media Empire are not so much Fox News or The Free Press, but Russia’s MIA Rossiya Segodnya or the China Media Group.

the organized cancellation of Hulu and Disney+ subscriptions shows how sensitive heavily leveraged media conglomerates are to even moderate declines in revenue

The dollar is no longer the reserve currency of American capitalism. Digital data is. Data strikes are not our only power, but they are an absolutely imperative one.