How the ‘Imperial Six’ support imperialism – and vice versa (part 5: Oracle)
On March 11, Al Jazeera reported that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had declared six key U.S. and Israeli corporations to be fair targets for resistance in the region: Google, IBM, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle and Palantir. These “Imperial Six” corporations uphold the U.S. economy of violence and destruction. Exposing them in solidarity with Iran and all nations targeted by imperialism will help to bring the war home and move the world toward justice.
Workers World has been publishing deep dives into the Imperial Six. Last time, the paper examined NVIDIA, the most valuable company on earth and the company at the heart of the imperialist boom in generative artificial intelligence. Part Five looks at a company behind both the imperial infrastructure of violence and a string of takeovers of bourgeois media corporations: Oracle.
Oracle makes database technology that manages vast amounts of data for customers. Just as with IBM, Oracle has been a project of U.S. imperialism since before the company even existed. In 1977, co-founder Larry Ellison was a contractor for the CIA, which had helped overthrow the Socialist Party government of Chile four years earlier and whose proxy government of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran would be overthrown two years later.
The name “Oracle” came from the code name for the CIA project Ellison was working on, and the agency would become the first customer of Ellison’s new company. Oracle remains very much a project of the CIA and the rest of the imperialist U.S. government. In 2020, it received part of a CIA cloud computing grant potentially worth billions of dollars, and this June Oracle pocketed a $400 million grant to handle human resources throughout the U.S. government.
Oracle is a core part of U.S. imperialism around the world, particularly in the Zionist entity Israel. The Zionist military has been a major Oracle customer since at least 2001, and the total revenue from contracts detailed by the Who Profits Research Center reached over $100 million. (whoprofits.org)
Oracle software supports the Zionist police, the population and immigration authority and the “civil administration,” which targets Palestinian construction for demolition. Oracle joined with fellow Imperial Six member NVIDIA, as well as OpenAI and Cisco Systems, to support the massive Stargate data center project in the United Arab Emirates, a U.S. client state currently carrying out a genocide in Sudan. It’s no surprise, then, that Ellison is the single largest donor to the Friends of the IDF (the so-called Israel Defense Forces)..
Oracle’s Ellison manufacturing consent
To manufacture support for imperialism, Ellison has used Oracle profits to purchase huge swaths of U.S. media. After pressuring the U.S. government to demand that the Chinese company ByteDance sell TikTok in order to suppress coverage of the Gaza genocide, Oracle took a 15% stake in the new TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, worth about $2 billion.
In August 2025, Skydance Media, which began as a vanity project for Ellison’s son, David Ellison, paid $8 billion to purchase Paramount, a giant firm whose television channels include CBS, MTV, BET and Nickelodeon. And in February 2026, the new Paramount Skydance purchased the massive Warner Bros. Discovery conglomerate for $110 billion, with $40 billion personally guaranteed by Larry Ellison.
Sitting atop Paramount and Warner Bros., the Ellisons now control an astonishing amount of U.S. media, from CBS and CNN to HBO, the Cartoon Network and DC Comics, plus films including Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Godzilla, Titanic and The Matrix.
This obscene influence was purchased with Oracle profits and serves the Ellisons’ interests of furthering U.S. imperialism at home, in Palestine and around the world.
Down with Oracle and the rest of the Imperial Six! Down with imperialism! Victory to Iran and to oppressed peoples everywhere!
