Transcription
For nearly a year, my colleagues and I have been investigating the Tony Blair Institute and Larry Ellison, the second richest man in the world. And what we found shocked us.
Larry Ellison is a fascinating character. He is the second richest man in the world, second only to Elon Musk, who is his good friend. Ellison is very close with the Israeli government; he's close with Benjamin Netanyahu. I have spent time with the people who govern the state of Israel. I feel a deep emotional connection to the state of Israel and the Israeli people, defended by all the brave men and women of the IDF. So anything we can do to support them. He has donated large amounts to the friends of the IDF. He's their biggest donor.
Ellison is co-founder of Oracle, which is a cloud computing company which has been around for decades now. Today, Oracle is on the verge of taking over the US version of TikTok, which is hugely influential among young people in America. We have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefields in which we're engaged, and the most important ones are the social media. And the most important purchase that is going on right now is... class? Followers. Bites? TikTok. Oh. TikTok, number one.
Oracle's former CEO Safra Catz is on record as saying she wants to embed the love and respect for Israel in America's culture. It violates our policy to have, "From the river to the sea," on your LinkedIn, like, all that kinda hate speech. We're just bringing the consequences. And if you wanna boycott us, buckle up.
David Ellison, Larry Ellison's son, is the owner of Paramount, which recently took ownership of CBS News, and CBS News is run by Ari Weiss, who is a self-proclaimed Zionist fanatic. We need to say out loud that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, full stop.
We saw Larry Ellison on a large screen at this massive world leaders summit in Dubai back in February talking about AI. He was being interviewed by Tony Blair. Blair was asking him about the kind of AI revolution, and Ellison said... "We need to unify all of the national data, put it into a database where it's easily consumable by the AI model, and then ask whatever question you like."
Through our reporting, we found that the UK government is starting to unify their data, and we've seen that the Tony Blair Institute has been advising them to do this. I mean, Tony Blair has always been a big advocate for ID cards in the UK, and more recently, like, digital ID cards, and the idea of that would be to bring together all personal data and have it in one place. Digital ID will make our interactions with each other and with the state faster, cheaper, and more reliable. There are arguments that it could be quite dangerous, potentially, to have personal data all in one place, and particularly if that system is run by one large private company. So it's interesting to see Tony Blair, like, pushing this so hard, and then Oracle kind of standing by, like, potentially ready to take on this job. Important to say as well that Larry Ellison, back in 2001 after 9/11 advocated for ID cards then, so he's, he's always been an advocate for this as well.
"Tell us a bit about what government should do in terms of its digital infrastructure, you know digital ID data centers and so on. You have to take all of your healthcare data, your diagnostic data, your electronic health records, your genomic data. The NHS in the UK has an incredible amount of population data, but it's fragmented, it's not easily accessible by these AI models. We have to take all of this data we have in our country and move it into a single, if you will, unified data platform. NHS data is a unique thing, a set of data that's been around for many, many decades, and there's not really anything quite like it."
People like Larry Ellison see this trove of data as a kind of treasure chest 'cause it's incredibly potentially monetarily valuable for someone like him. These AI models are trained primarily by data that's publicly available on the internet. Your national health records aren't available on the internet, that stuff is not available, but that's, that's very precious, very, very precious for your data.
From our reporting, we found that the Tony Blair Institute, the TBI, is really deeply embedded in Keir Starmer's government. There's a risk here that with TBI in the ear of the UK government and Larry Ellison in the ear of the TBI, that very valuable thing that we've got in the UK right now is gonna be co-opted. That means that we're not gonna benefit from that; instead, this US billionaire is gonna be the one who benefits. It also hands over all of our personal data, and that should concern all of us.
Ellison and Blair were first pictured together in 2003 when Ellison donated supplies to specialist schools in the UK, and we know that since then they've been close friends. They've been seen pictured together on some of Ellison's massive yachts and on his Hawaiian island that he basically owns, Lanai Island, it's called. Blair has recorded a video for Oracle. "Oracle, I've been immensely excited by the willingness to solve problems together for the greater good of humanity, and I appreciate Oracle's leadership position in this space."
When Blair was in office, he gave Oracle quite a number of UK government contracts, and now we see that Larry Ellison, obviously founder of Oracle, is donating huge amounts to the TBI, north of 250 million pounds. And the TBI has huge influence on the UK government and which companies it chooses for its own contracts. Ministers in the UK government regularly meet with TBI employees and discuss policy around AI, data capture, NHS data, and the future of healthcare and how AI can play a role in that, and where it's clear to see that Oracle, Larry Ellison's company, is set to benefit from those policies. Oracle has made over 1.1 billion pounds from UK government contracts to date. It's an incredibly lucrative place for Ellison and Oracle to be. So the fact that we now know that Ellison's interests are being pushed by TBI on the UK government is incredibly worrying 'cause Ellison knows that this is a place where he's making a lot of money already and he's just gonna be set to make even more. Clearly huge conflicts of interest here.
The title of Larry Ellison's biography was "What's the Difference Between Larry Ellison and God? God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison," which I think is quite telling. His wealth isn't just some kind of distant abstract thing. Like, he's making a lot of money off the UK government and UK taxpayers and taxpayers around the world and making huge amounts from systems and tools that aren't necessarily set to benefit us. There's a lot around surveillance and bringing all the data together so that it's in one place so that governments can use it to surveil people. And Ellison's actually made this clear. He said... "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on. And the camera's always on. You don't turn it on and off."
"Oracle, I need, I need, I need two minutes to take a bathroom break, and we'll, we'll turn it off." The truth is we don't really turn it off. What we do is we record it so no one can see it, but no one can get into that recording without a court order. And I think that should scare us to have one of the richest men in the world saying this, and at the same time, that same technology that's gonna enable this, he's ultimately gonna benefit from the use of that technology monetarily to make himself more money. That should concern all of us.
"I'm going to lunch with my friends. Oracle, I need an hour for privacy with lunch with my friends." God bless. We won't listen in unless there's a court order.
The Tony Blair Institute is a think tank in the UK, by far the largest. It has US levels of funding. Since Labour got into power, we've seen TBI have increasing influence on government policy. We know that Peter Kyle, the former technology secretary, that he was meeting Tony Blair himself every couple of weeks. It seems like ministers don't really have a full grasp of this stuff, so they're kind of like, "Oh, TBI knows how to do it. TBI is, like, really good with technology, so we'll just listen to them and take on kind of whatever they suggest." TBI will publish a report and then within weeks or even days, the UK government has taken on their recommendations essentially. And then on a kind of more international level, we see TBI as this more kind of consultancy advisory entity where you see TBI employees embedded within governments. A lot of countries in the Global South especially, we've seen that there's this kind of huge push by TBI for big tech and AI boosterism.
At the Tony Blair Institute, we believe that technology is key to reimagining the state. There's a lot of concern among TBI and former TBI employees about this. A lot of employees told us they decided to work for TBI because they really believed in the mission of kind of encouraging governments to embrace technology but in a kind of responsible, safe way, but that they realized it ended up being much more about trying to sell certain technologies. Staff were told to really push Oracle's services and that they were having to do this despite kind of sometimes knowing that this wasn't the best option for the local populations. There were other companies offering better suited systems for those countries. Tech sales for Oracle, that's how people described it. They were having to do tech PR, tech sales, and that was not what they got into this job for.
The influence and power of big tech is seeping into people's consciousness more and more. There's now a slow realization that this isn't gonna benefit normal people. None of this is set to benefit us, people on the ground. And by shining a light on these issues, I'm also hopeful that more journalists will start to look into the big tech lobby and how they're having such a big say at the moment in our policies and to actually speak up against that and campaign for the big tech billionaires to have less influence.
With our current media landscape in the UK, the importance of independent media is huge. If you wanna see more independent content like this, feel free to support Double Down News on Patreon.