The Existentialist Republic

10/21/2025

Between October 23 and October 25, 2024, billionaires Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong blocked their newspapers’ planned endorsements of Kamala Harris. Both the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times had already drafted endorsements. Both billionaires overrode their editorial boards within 72 hours. Polling at the time showed Trump’s victory becoming probable. On October 25, the day Bezos killed the Post endorsement, Blue Origin executives met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. The sequence matters: endorsement killed, executives met with Trump, same day.

Within 60 days of Trump’s November 5 victory, a pattern emerged. Billionaires whose companies hold more than $50 billion in federal contracts made identical $1 million donations to Trump’s inauguration. They visited Mar-a-Lago in what Bloomberg termed a “pilgrimage.” They restructured media organizations under their control. The timing was compressed and the actions were parallel.

Larry Ellison’s son David closed an $8 billion Skydance-Paramount merger in August 2025, delivering control of CBS News and 28 local television stations. The deal’s timeline deserves scrutiny. Paramount paid Trump $16 million on July 2, 2025 to settle a lawsuit over a 60 Minutes interview. Twenty-two days later, the FCC approved the merger. Payment preceded approval. Within months, David Ellison acquired Bari Weiss’s conservative outlet The Free Press for $150 million, a fifteen times revenue multiple suggesting motivations beyond financial return. He installed Weiss as CBS News Editor-in-Chief. Veteran journalists resigned. By October 2025, Ellison was pursuing Warner Bros Discovery in a $60-75 billion acquisition that would deliver CNN. Simultaneously, the elder Larry Ellison positioned to control TikTok’s U.S. operations through a consortium deal.

Oligarch Larry Ellison’s political trajectory shows interesting escalation. He hosted a Trump fundraiser in February 2020. He joined a November 2020 conference call with Lindsey Graham and Sean Hannity discussing how to contest election results. He donated $31 million to Republican candidates in 2022. He invested $1-2 billion in Musk’s Twitter takeover. He worked with Heritage Foundation compiling Trump appointee loyalty databases. He bought $450 million in real estate near Mar-a-Lago. After Trump’s 2025 inauguration, he became a regular White House visitor. These activities occurred before his son’s media acquisitions gained regulatory approval.

Elon Musk’s timeline compressed further. In March 2024, Musk posted he would not donate to either presidential candidate. By July he had begun contributing and publicly endorsed Trump. By November he had donated $277-290 million to Trump’s campaign, becoming Trump’s largest donor. He then took an illegal, unauthorized, and fabricated government position as DOGE co-leader with unprecedented authority over agencies regulating his companies. The progression from no donations to largest donor to government position overseeing his own regulators occurred in eight months.