Larry Ellison – 'citizens will be on their best behavior' amid nonstop recording
fortune.com
fortune.com
He and others are pushing for Bari Weiss take a key role at CBS to better "defend Israel":
https://nypost.com/2025/09/19/media/shari-redstone-says-bari...
And many people are worried about a similar type of agenda setting at TikTok now:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/will-tiktoks-new-own...
Netanyahu, for his part, believes it is super consequential for Ellison to takeover TikTok:
https://x.com/TheTNHoller/status/1972326967983923636 (Video)
https://jewishinsider.com/2025/09/tiktok-sale-netanyahu-amer... (Summary)
(And if that wasn't enough, Ellison has his eyes set on Warner Brothers next, which includes CNN: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/business/media/paramount-... )
Would his statements be better if he were pro-Gaza or something else?
Is this not self-evident?
Read in good faith, it’s overzealous advocacy. In bad faith, which I don’t assume here, it serves to get this discussion flagged off the front page.
In case you don't, to me it's painfully clear that these are just different aspects of the move towards more authoritarian forms of government. You CANNOT support a genocide and expect that this will not have an effect on democracy.
EDIT: Also note that I am trying to take your comments on good faith, but characterising support for genocide as "a foreign policy disagreement" feels a bit like an understatement.
Sure. But, like, the evidence for that is the advocacy for a surveillance state. Not his support for a foreign policy project that yes, involves supporting an autocratic government in Israel (fighting, let’s be fair, an autocratic force in Gaza backed by an autocratic state in Iran), but also a whole bunch of other irrelevant things.
He is definitely calling it "polarizing" and minimizing it. I infer that he is supportive of it then.
1. Ellison's comments about surveillance
2. Conservative billionaires, including Ellison, consolidating ownership of social media, print media, TV media, etc.
3. NSPM-7 & the current admin's appetite to criminalize speech
4. The current administration kowtows to Netanyahu, who relishes in conservative ownership of TikTok
The dots are all there: if you express something that doesn't following an accepted US stance, like maybe its stance on Israel, maybe on TikTok, it gives Trump the ability to easily find, label & punish you as a terrorist, maybe even at Netanyahu's request. Trump's desire to do things like this has been explicitly stated since the death of Charlie Kirk. He's always talked about his desires to throw his political enemies in jail.
Even before this, the admin has been targeting people like Mahmoud Khalil, Mario Guevara, etc. for speech.
If his statement is true, then the real Larry Ellison (not publicly known one) is worse than a genocide supporter. He basically discredits himself by making that statement.
It literally wouldn’t. Whether people behave better when surveilled in independently verifiable. Whether or not bees exist doesn’t revolve around the political beliefs of the person claiming they do.
Anyway, I agree it is a verifiable fact, but it also can be a personal belief. Does L.E. provide any evidence, or is he stating it authoritatively?
In any case, one big piece of evidence we have for the claim is that Israel doesn't allow any foreign journalists in Gaza, and is trying to control Tiktok, in which L.E. seems to be involved.
So by pointing that belief out, L.E. indicates he is even a worse guy, because in some cases he disagrees with such independent monitoring.
This is relevant! Consider how much more interesting the top comment would be if it called out this hypocrisy instead of the same old 'so and so is pro X and herego a bad guy'.
How about he and CBS News and TikTok be neutral and truth seeking rather than being pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian? I would like news organizations to be truth seeking and I would like social media to not be tinting my view of the world towards what their billionaire owners want.
Maybe that is too much?
I agree. But easier said than done. Especially when it comes to something as polarising as Gaza, playing the moderate essentially cedes the debate. (Both sources you mention are supported by ads. Their metric is engagement, not informativeness.)
One should expect news sources to report that the main Israeli human rights groups believe it is a genocide, the main international human rights groups believe it is a genocide, UN investigatory panels believe it is a genocide, genocide scholars believe it is a genocide:
https://www.btselem.org/publications/202507_our_genocide
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/12/amnesty-inter...
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-c...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cde3eyzdr63o
Those that disagree with this assessment are in a minority. But to you it is just "polarizing."
You are denying reality that is in front of you because you want to. And this is resulting in more families being wiped out, people starving to death and for Netanyahu and his coalition that want to "voluntary migrate" the Palestinians away from Gaza for Israeli settlements: https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/24/middleeast/israel-approves-pr...
Larry Ellison cannot be anthropomorphized. His entire life is one sociopathic, misanthropic soap opera.
What is his motivation? Why is Israel relevant?
> what does this have to do with the story?
This is like seeing a web page not load due to a 504, then asking why people are discussing a database failure when your page isn’t loading.
Patterns like Ellison are rife in American politics (look at some of trumps major donors, guys like Bill Ackman were lifelong dems that suddenly because conservative after Oct 7). It’s the reason we’re one of the only countries defending the genocide in Gaza. It plays a large part in our otherwise polarized congress showing bipartisan support for financing Israel’s “defenses”.
America makes a lot of anti American decisions because guys like Ellison are some of the most powerful in the country.
Historical precedent:
> It was the first conflict in which military action was precipitated by media involvement. The war grew out of U.S. interest in a fight for revolution between the Spanish military and citizens of their Cuban colony. American newspapers fanned the flames of interest in the war by fabricating atrocities which justified intervention in a number of Spanish colonies worldwide.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_propaganda_of_the_Spa...
* https://history.state.gov/milestones/1866-1898/yellow-journa...
The hard truth is that weaponizing your money — earned largely from Americans — to aid a foreign country at the expense of America is about as un-American as it gets. Aside from the potentially valid argument that your voice shouldn’t be louder just because you are a billionaire — you are corrupting American foreign policy and American stature in the world to advance the agenda of Israel. That is a betrayal of America.
No, they’ll be accused of derailing the conversation.
Every pro-Palestinian activist isn’t civically compromised because they have strong views on foreign policy.
> you are corrupting American foreign policy and American stature in the world to advance the agenda of Israel. That is a betrayal of America.
This is a convoluted and hyperbolic way of expressing foreign-policy disagreement.
Foreign policy is almost universally a quid pro quo. Whilst there may be something for the USA in this it feels very asymmetric unless I am missing something.
At the state level, often. At the individual level, I don't think so.
My pet war is Ukraine. I don't have any personal stake in the war. I just think it's abhorrent and poses a long-term risk to the security interests of places and people I care about. I can construct that into a narrative of fulfilling American geopolitical interests, but that's an exercise I'd be engaging in after I'd come to my view based on, essentially, a moral preference.
That preference is real. But it's mine and far from universal. That someone thinks Russia is justified in invading Ukraine is frankly irrelevant to the validity of their statements on other matters. That's where I'm calling bullshit on this connection.
All this has absolutely nothing to do with Larry Ellison and frankly this whole thread is mostly idiotic. It could have been an interesting topic but some seem to have other priorities. Which are quite transparent.
Israel does a lot of dirty work in fighting back against the darker forces of middle east terrorism, and it's reasonable to believe it is in the U.S.'s interest to let Israel do that work rather than take it on itself. It is a similar argument to why the U.S. should back Ukraine in the fight against Russia.
You can of course disagree with the above (arguing against interventionism; the risk of blowback; that Israel is creating more terrorism than it is solving; etc.), but I truly don't believe that any of the pro-Israel crowd believes they are acting against the U.S. interest.
> “We’re going to have supervision,” Ellison said. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
I'd say I'm about as much against the modern surveillance state as the next codger, but that doesn't mean I don't understand its implications. People do act differently when they know they are being watched. Even more so when they know they are being recorded.
There's still quite a bit of federation in that each store or home has its own cameras, and chaining them together to get an end-to-end view of a series of events is still manual. But that won't be like that forever. Whether we like it or not, that's only going to get easier.
I really want to see more evidence for this. People act differently when they face consequences. More surveillance without enforcement wouldn’t be expected to positively change behaviour.
Research has demonstrated these behavioral changes in various species, including:
Primates: Monkeys and apes often alter their social interactions and grooming behaviors when they know they are being observed by humans or other primates.
Birds: Studies have shown that birds may change their foraging behavior when they detect human presence, often becoming more cautious.
Fish: Some fish species exhibit changes in swimming patterns and social behavior when they sense they are being watched.
We have been mired in a surveillance state for a long time now. They now will have the processing power to make sure nobody can keep their head down and slip through the cracks. I imagine it's going to be a rough century.
Even when people are doing stuff like browsing pr0n, there's likely to be someone paying attention. Maybe not like those silly spam emails, but they know that we watched dwarf pr0n.
Have you ever taken any civic action?
I'm not saying it's a good thing. I'm just saying it's a thing; no matter what we think of it.
Not necessarily. Broadly. Advocacy, petitioning, calling, electioneering, drafting, lobbying, organising, et cetera.
A civically inactive citizenry frankly doesn’t have that much to lose from surveillance. Someone failing to exercise their political rights (EDIT: leaving them unexercised) pretty clearly communicates the value they place in them.
I see what you did, there...
I tend to get a lot done. Not really into the whole "sound and fury" thing. I like to actually have results.
Genuinely asked if you’re politically engaged because I’m curious how that squares with your views on this topic?
Most Americans are not civically engaged. That’s sort of expected. Their principal opposition to surveillance revolves around being creeped out. Most folks who are civically engaged, on the other hand, recognise the risks to themselves and their projects if the opposition can command these tools. (As well as the power that would come with commanding them oneself.) If that link is no longer true, or not universally valid, I’m genuinely interested in hearing it. Because that implies independent civic action can survive—or potentially even thrive in—a modern surveillance state.
I'm a recovering drug addict. I have quite an appreciation for privacy and anonymity. I have a lot more skin in the game than most.
However, there's the fantasy world in our heads, and the reality of the truth. These don't always overlap.
It's my job to work with yucchy reality. It doesn't give a damn what I think it should be. It's my responsibility to modify my approach to be most effective, given the context.
"When the map and the terrain disagree; believe the terrain." - Swiss Army aphorism
The long march of us making terrible decisions with technology continues. I'm not sure how to get away from it.
"We" don't all view the world through the same lens. And moreover not on all matters. Your framing is erroneous, which leads to incorrect assumptions and strategy.
It may very well be true that in some cases, a bad actor asking you to do a bad thing X will simply find someone else to do it. However, consider the following:
* If there were someone more desperate than you and willing to do X, they would demand lower compensation, and the bad actor wouldn't even be talking to you.
* By saying no, you are inherently making bad thing X more expensive, because said bad actor has to spend more resources finding someone else to do it.
* Saying no gives cover for your peers who disagree with X to also say no.
* The person said bad actor finally finds to do X will inherently have more leverage to ask for greater compensation due to the fact that you, by saying no, have shrunk the pool of people capable of doing X.
* If enough people say no, said bad actor may never find someone both capable of doing X and willing to do it for the price point the bad actor is willing/able to pay.
I don't turn down jobs I disagree with because I necessarily believe it will stop those jobs from happening. I'm satisfied enough with keeping my conscience clear and knowing I made the job a little harder to accomplish.
Seems to be an awful lot of that recently to justify anything, from mass surveillance to crypto fascism. "Its just how things are guys, law of nature!". As citizens of a civilized society, we collectively get to shape and orient how legislation is put into practice. But ofc, if all you and people like you have to offer is pre-deterministic fallacies, then we are indeed screwed.
Police surveillance is just one part, combining different data sources and analyzing them through AI is how he envisions law enforcement to function. That cops aren't above that is perfectly coherent with that.
Police (in the US) demonstrably do not care that they're being recorded and don't act any differently.
People don't have one standard of behavior. I won't tell my kid jokes, I tell my wife. I won't complain about people in public, the way I vent to my sister (who gets it is just me venting, not how I feel all the time". I am not going to speak to a cop as I'm getting a speeding ticket, they way I will talk to one who is harassing a friend at a parade.
I won't talk to / about a co-worker in a meeting, the way I talk to someone he just (rightly, but very meanly) chewed out, and who needs a boss who listens, or will I talk to him in a meeting the way I will (a tad later) chew him out for making a coworker cry.
This take is so naive and emotionally / socially unintelligent about human behavior in various situations.
It's really not.
Any minor transgression from most people will be punished severely. Even the worst transgression from powerful people will be forgiven. That's how our system works. Don't ever think that Orwellian surveillance will put everyone on a level playing field. As an ultra-powerful person, Larry Ellison is well aware of this.
Not really.
In "a randomized controlled trial involving more than 400 police officers in Las Vegas, Nevada...officers equipped with body-worn cameras generated fewer complaints and use of force reports relative to officers without cameras. BWC officers also made more arrests and issued more citations than their non-BWC counterparts" [1].
More broadly, "there remains substantial uncertainty about whether BWCs can reduce officer use of force, but the variation in effects suggests there may be conditions in which BWC could be effective" [2]. ("Restricting officer discretion in turning on and off BWCs may reduce police use of force," and while "BWCs may reduce the number of citizen complaints against police officers...it is unclear why complaints decline.")
[1] https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/jclc/vol108/is...
"Our meta‐analysis of 30 studies and 116 effects of police use of BWCs finds that this technology produces few clear or consistent impacts on police or citizen behaviors."
London is the most surveilled city in the world outside China, in terms of the number of intelligent cameras they have around the city, yet that does not stop crime from being significantly reduced.
Source? (I'm inclined to agree with you. Hence my desire for substantiation.)
COVID had a bigger impact on crime lol. I don't trust the numbers from the London Mayor's office when Sadiq Khan tries to skew and skewer numbers in various ways to his advantage. I do trust my rich Arab friends though, when they tell me they're not visiting London anymore for summers because they've been mugged.
There is a whole genre of short form and streaming videos where the subject films himself violating social norms and breaking the law.
The majority of perpetrators do not care.
"Nineteen Eighty-Four" by George Orwell.[a]
---
Sorry, all billionaires are “assets of the state secret police”? So who calls the shots?
>Why is it that every single person born between 1940 and 1965 (or making more than $1 million per year)
Every single person in that age range?
May I ask what your rationale was for picking $1m as the threshold? Hundreds of thousands of Americans make between $1m and $5m (another arbitrary range) and millions of Americans worth more than $1m.
It so happens that in parts of North America this life experience is associated mostly with a certain set of of age/demographics.
It's just really counterproductive to focus on these easy "majority" stats that break down on examination and contribute to the polarization of society.
For one, he has direct access to (and these days also likely direct influence over) some of the most important members of the legislative and executive branches of the government.
Video games and YouTube can't be entirely to blame for the significant falls in alcohol consumption and the night entertainment industry generally. People don't want to get drunk, do something stupid, and end up on blast all over the Internet now that everyone's carrying a camera connected to the entire world in real time.
Heck forget drinking, these days there's always someone nearby who's ready to upload your worst moment to Tiktok, so don't you dare have mental health issues either.
God knows he's not Larry Ellison.
I heard that over 35 years ago. I wonder how much older it is.
See this woman for an example: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/live-woman-decl...
what are a couple of examples you have in mind that support your claim of this trend? I must be living under a rock because I have not detected this.
You can get the populace to swallow surveillance if you give them an enemy. See: PATRIOT act. Anyone wanna take bets on what this one will be called.
Omnipresent AI cameras will ensure good behavior, says Larry Ellison
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41562750
Larry Ellison: vast AI surveillance can ensure citizens are on best behavior
don't ever create a precedent if you dont want your enemies to use your tools against you. that + the fact that LLMs will accelerate a lot of the surveillance industry.
such as?
Why stop just here? It's AI, right? So it’s all about prediction - next token, next action, it doesn’t matter. Let’s turn Minority Report the movie into reality: when you’re angry at your boss while commuting home, we will watch, predict and prevent your future bad behavior.
This dude has almost half a trillion dollars to his name.
Larry, instead of waxing lyrical about your desire for a police state, how about you bugger off to a private island and establish your own society there, and leave the rest of the world for people who don't clamor for more money after making hundreds of billions of dollars.
Some people just aren't satisfied with having too much. I'm not in favor of a "abolish billionaires" catch-all policy, but from having met a bunch of billionaires, some just need to call it a day and spend more time with their families.
Entities with this level of resources and influence have very little in common with people, other than biology. We would do well to instead perceive them as dangerous alien parasites -- not precisely hostile, but lacking social connection to the rest of us, and indifferent to the suffering of humanity.
Criticize the president? Not best behavior. Kiss someone of your sex/gender? Not best behavior. Call AI stupid? Not best behavior. Whistleblower on out a deadly chemical leak? Not best behavior. Disagree with a politician? Not best behavior. Defined LGBTQ+ people's rights? Not best behavior. Criticize Isreal ? Not best behavior.
They are going to define "best behavior" in a way that never threatens their feelings, let alone threatens their powers, if you let them.
You are painfully correct https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/trumps-nspm-7-labels-commo...
> hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family,
> hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and
> hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.
You seem to be a paragon of discernment regarding extremely subjective, ill-defined areas. How impressive.
Quickest way to kill this dangerous idea.
Or even i2p: https://geti2p.net
The fact that we reliably and repeatedly see peasants (i.e. any less equal animal, so everyone here) who have no such excuse cheerleading for specific implementations in furtherance of their pet issues bothers me greatly. I'd say you ought to know better, but you do. When these subjects are discussed on a general level everyone acknowledges they're bad so clearly everyone gets it on a big picture level. But when the discussion is speed cameras, surveillance at the park, siphoning off of mundane consumer financial transaction data, etc, etc those things have strong support. People are clearly happy to put up with the threats posed by pervasive surveillance lest some other peasant step the slightest bit out of line and get away with it. I think this contradiction speaks volumes about character.
Edit: /s, in case it wasn't obvious
[1] Problematic in the sense that the persons holding such vast wealth seem to go bonkers AND for the problems inequality leads to for society
Portraying these people as naive villains is not helpful at all. They have very clear goals and the means to accomplish them.
Their goals and their perspectives should mean that they have absolutely no business making policy decisions for society but unfortunately people are naive and easily influenced.
>Their goals and their perspectives should mean that they have absolutely no business making policy decisions
He doesn't make policy decisions and claiming he does completely undermines how corporations and their leaders wield their influence.
"we'll just surveil everything and use AI and it'll work" " = "let them eat cake". What he's peddling just won't work (in all likelihood) and everybody else (most of the other 99.99%) knows it.
I just finished If We Burn by Vincent Bevins and When the Clock Broke by John Ganz
One point (of many) repeatedly hammered home, with IRL examples, is that a whole lot of people demand Order, even at the expensive of Justice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_We_Burn
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/195790601-when-the-clock...
A very successful evergreen (authoritarian) playbook is to keep people anxious, so that they'll accede -- nay demand -- to ever more draconian, reactionary policies.
Something we're experiencing firsthand right now in the USA.
Like if we want to run society with summary execution for petty thieves or inequality under the law or whatever then fine, but have the balls to say that, because without an understanding of the goals and acceptable tradeoffs we can't effectively pursue the goals without hitting unacceptable tradeoffs.
But people don't come out and say these things because if you reason about the implications it's pretty clear they're shit ideas so what people do instead is lie and misdirect and whatnot in order to advocate for "bad in principal, arguably positive in result" things on their pet issue. But when you multiply by everyone's pet issues we get the current garbage and current trajectory.
I think part of the problem is that as material plenty increases the number of people partaking in discourse because they have existential problems that need solving goes down so discourse is increasingly dominated by "fake problems". This is also why you're seeing a pendulum shift away from "feel good" policies toward more "tough decision" policies as it gets harder for people in the lower majority of society (70%, 80%, idk) to make ends meet. So basically I'm hopeful that things get more honest and more sane as we get poorer, which sucks, I guess, but hey, silver linings.
Eric Schmidt
At one point, being gay was against the law, abortion is against the law in some places, at one time being an atheist could get your head cut off. Let's do some nonstop recording of Larry Ellison, his children, his entire family, his neighbors, because they'll "be on their best behavior, a midnight nonstop recording"
The rich and elite never think about these things because they never consider that it might also effect them.
Objectively, it is [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intenti... 1.1 vs 5.8 intentional homicides per 100,000
Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, just to name a few, are all below the UK rate.
To which country’s citizens do you think the article featuring Larry Ellison on a podium next to Donald Trump is referring ?
If I was trying to say that the UK is safe because it's #30 on the Peace Index when the USA was higher, then my comment wouldn't carry much weight. Or if the USA was a place or two behind then my comment wouldn't be strong.
Larry Ellison is in the USA and presumably his "Citizens will be on their best behaviour" is mostly aimed at USA citizens, and HN and the internet are USA-centric so USA makes a big obvious comparison.
So do you think Ellison is right? That surveillance would make the US much safer?
I don't think it's a good idea for a free society, it would be hell to live in. The chilling effect, the number of laws is too high to keep track of, it probably isn't be possible to always be on best behaviour 24/7 for a lifetime.
When robot camera insects with wireless mesh networking and power scavenging hit a few dollars each, there won't be a private space on the planet ever again. Any spider, beetle, fly, in any room, outside any window, on any surface, will be a potential camera drone.
Or they realize they don't?
Evil always eats its own. Why would the US be any different? It only takes one ruthlessly ambitious murderous psychopath with a deviant personal life to spoil things for everyone.
Tired of all these "rules for thee" while certain classes remain unaffected.