Technology & Power
NewsOnScale Staff
October 25, 2026
In 2012 Larry Ellison — co-founder of Oracle Corporation and one of the wealthiest people in the world — purchased 98% of Lanai, Hawaii for $300 million. Lanai is 141 square miles. Approximately 3,000 people live there.
Ellison owns their hotels. He owns their housing. He controls their water supply. He controls the power grid. He owns the only airline that flies to the island — meaning the only way on or off Lanai by air is through a charter service Ellison controls. He is the primary employer of nearly a quarter of the island's residents through his two Four Seasons resorts.
A resident of Lanai who was there when Ellison bought the island put it plainly: "It's kind of strange that in 2012, a medieval system of having one man own an island in the middle of the state, on which 3,000 people live, can still exist."
That resident was right. It is strange. It is also legal. And it is a preview of what Ellison has publicly said he wants to build everywhere else.
What Ellison said out loud
At Oracle's financial analyst meeting in September 2024 Ellison described his vision for AI-powered surveillance of American citizens. He was not speaking hypothetically. He was describing a system Oracle is actively building.
"Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on," Ellison said. "The cars have cameras on them. We're using AI to monitor the video. It's all done autonomously with AI."
He also said: "The police would be on their best behavior because we're constantly watching and recording everything that's going on."
Ellison framed constant surveillance as a benefit — a mechanism for ensuring good behavior from both citizens and law enforcement. He did not address who controls the surveillance infrastructure. He did not address who has access to the recordings. He did not address what happens to the data. He did not address what recourse citizens have when the AI makes a mistake.
He described a world where every car has a camera, every public space is monitored, and AI processes the footage in real time to report behavior to authorities.
Observers immediately noted the comparison. The world Ellison described is functionally identical to China's social credit system — a network of AI-powered cameras using facial recognition to monitor citizens' behavior and report deviations to the state.
Who owns the infrastructure to build this
Oracle is one of the largest government data contractors in the United States. The company holds contracts with federal agencies, intelligence organizations, military branches, and law enforcement departments across the country. Oracle's cloud infrastructure manages sensitive government data at scale.
The man calling for omnipresent AI camera surveillance of American citizens runs the company that holds the government data contracts that would make omnipresent AI camera surveillance technically possible.
This is not a coincidence. It is a business model.
Oracle builds the surveillance infrastructure. Oracle sells it to government agencies. Government agencies deploy it on American citizens. Oracle's revenue grows with every camera installed and every gigabyte of footage processed.
The island as a prototype
Lanai is worth examining not just as a real estate transaction but as a model. On Lanai Ellison controls the housing, the utilities, the employment, the transportation, and the economy of 3,000 people. Those people are not his employees or his tenants in any ordinary sense. They are residents of a place he owns — a place where their ability to work, to live, and to leave depends on decisions made by one man.
A Nation article described residents as "painfully aware they are little more than members of Larry Ellison's servant caste." Ellison's company gated public access to the island's only swimmable beach — violating Hawaii law — before a warning from Maui County forced compliance.
When COVID hit Lanai in 2020 the island's economy collapsed not because of a government failure but because one man decided to lay off nearly all resort workers. Residents had no recourse. Their economic fate was determined by a single private decision made by the man who owns 98% of the ground they live on.
This is feudalism. Not a metaphor for feudalism. Actual feudalism — a system in which land ownership confers control over the people who live on that land.
The man who built a feudal island kingdom in Hawaii is now describing a surveillance system that would extend the essential logic of that kingdom — one person's visibility into and control over everything that happens — to every city in America.
The Oracle founder story
Larry Ellison was born in New York City in 1944 to a 19 year old unmarried mother. She gave him up at nine months old after he contracted pneumonia. He was raised in a two bedroom apartment on Chicago's South Side by his mother's aunt and uncle — a lower middle class family with limited means.
His adoptive father told him repeatedly he would never amount to anything. That relationship defined him. Ellison has described it as the central wound of his life and the source of the competitive obsession that drives everything he has built since. He was not told he was adopted until he was in his teens.
He attended the University of Illinois and then the University of Chicago but dropped out of both without graduating. His adoptive mother died during his second year at Chicago. He drove to California in the late 1960s and worked whatever technical jobs he could find — data entry, programming, systems work. He taught himself to code at a time when that skill was rare and valuable.
In 1977 he co-founded Oracle with Bob Miner and Ed Oates with $2,000 of his own money. The company's name came from a CIA database project he had worked on. The CIA was one of Oracle's first customers — a database management system for intelligence records.
Of all the founders covered in this series Ellison's personal origin is the most genuinely working class. No DARPA grandfather. No Wall Street salary. No private tutors or elite prep school. A two bedroom apartment in Chicago, a father who said he'd never succeed, and two college dropouts.
The CIA contract was still the foundation. The government relationship was still the seed. But unlike the others whose myths obscure inherited advantage, Ellison's myth obscures something different — a man who came from genuine hardship and used the system's tools to build something that now threatens to use those same tools against everyone else.
That is not the redemption arc it might appear to be. A man who survived powerlessness and responded by accumulating total power over an island of 3,000 people and calling for surveillance of every citizen is not a success story. It is a warning.
The pattern holds. The CIA seed. The government contract foundation. The self-made myth that obscures the institutional relationships that made the scale possible.
What this means
Larry Ellison owns 98% of a Hawaiian island where 3,000 Americans live under conditions of total economic and infrastructural dependence on one man. He publicly called for AI cameras to record all American citizens at all times. His company holds the government contracts that would enable that surveillance infrastructure to be deployed nationally.
He is not a fringe figure. He is the co-founder of a $400 billion company. His son David controls CNN, CBS, and HBO through Skydance. He has dined regularly with Elon Musk — the man who owns the primary platform of American political communication and holds billions in defense contracts. He holds government data contracts across federal agencies.
The man who built a feudal island is building the infrastructure for a feudal country.
He said so himself. Out loud. At a financial analyst meeting. With the cameras rolling.
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