KVIG Informative

Dana White built a $12 billion combat sports empire alongside Donald Trump. Larry Ellison paid to host his fundraisers and stood beside him at the White House. His son David traded a Democratic donor history for ringside seats at UFC fights and a $16 million settlement that cleared the path to a media merger. Each investment paid off. The question is what everyone else paid.

On June 14, 2026, the south lawn of the White House will be converted into a fight venue. A temporary arena seating 3,000 to 4,000 people will be erected at a projected cost of $60 million, paid entirely by the UFC. Two championship fights will take place before an invitation-only crowd of political allies, foreign dignitaries, and industry partners. The event, named UFC Freedom 250, coincides with Trump’s 80th birthday and Flag Day. It will air on Paramount+, the streaming service now controlled by David Ellison, whose father Larry helped make it possible. Dana White, who has described Trump as someone who embodies what being an American is all about, told reporters it would be the greatest fight card ever assembled.

The three men at the center of that event, Dana White, Larry Ellison, and David Ellison, are also three of the most consequential donors and allies in Trump’s political network. Their support has translated directly into government contracts, regulatory approvals, media deals, and a foreign policy posture. The immigration enforcement agenda that has swept through Nevada’s workforce communities, separating families and emptying hotel back-of-house operations from Henderson to North Las Vegas, is the same agenda their donations helped elect, sustain, and legitimate.

This is the story of what that loyalty bought, and what it cost everyone else.

Dana White: The Fighter in the Corner

Dana White grew up in Las Vegas and built the UFC from a near-bankrupt regional promotion into a $12 billion global combat sports organization, which TKO Group Holdings sold to Endeavor and subsequently took public. His relationship with Donald Trump stretches back decades, predating both men’s current prominence. White appeared at the 2016 Republican National Convention to endorse Trump. He spoke at the 2020 convention. In November 2024, he appeared at Trump’s election night victory party in Palm Beach and delivered one of the evening’s most quoted statements, calling Trump someone who embodies what it means to be an American.

White’s name did not appear in the FEC filing for the 2025 inaugural committee, which documented more than $239 million in donations, more than double the previous record. Front Office Sports confirmed White attended the inauguration. His spokesperson confirmed he contributed to the inaugural fund but did not appear in the public filing.

White’s validation has not been passive. He stood beside Trump as Trump mused publicly about creating a migrant fighting league. White confirmed to reporters the conversation had occurred and characterized it as a joke. He did not publicly object to the framing of immigrants as a commodity for spectacle.

The return on White’s loyalty arrived in multiple forms. The UFC signed a seven-year, $7.7 billion media rights deal with Paramount in August 2025, the largest in the promotion’s history, moving marquee events from pay-per-view to the Paramount+ streaming platform now controlled by David Ellison. The June 14 event at the White House is not a charitable gesture. It is a $60 million branded activation on the most visible piece of real estate in the country, funded by the UFC and broadcast on Paramount+, on the president’s birthday.

Larry Ellison: The Infrastructure of Power

Larry Ellison founded Oracle in 1977, naming the company after a CIA database project that was Oracle’s first customer. He built it into one of the world’s dominant enterprise software and cloud computing firms and accumulated a net worth that briefly made him the richest person on earth in late 2025, surpassing Elon Musk, before settling back to approximately $350 billion.

The payoff under Trump’s second term has been without precedent. On January 21, 2025, Ellison stood at the White House alongside the president to announce the Stargate Project, a $500 billion AI infrastructure initiative in which Oracle committed $100 billion to build new data centers. Trump described Ellison as sort of CEO of everything. Oracle subsequently secured nearly a half-trillion dollars in contracts to supply computing power to AI companies. Ellison relocated his primary residence from his private Hawaiian island to Manalapan, Florida, twenty minutes from Mar-a-Lago, in early 2026.

The immigration connection is structural. Oracle’s lobbying operation deployed 64 lobbyists across 11 firms in the first half of 2025 and targeted the Department of Homeland Security among its primary government contacts. Oracle was forced to pay $115 million in July 2024 to settle a lawsuit accusing it of building digital dossiers on individuals and selling the data to third parties. The settlement did not require the company to stop the practice.

David Ellison: The Pivot That Bought a Merger

David Ellison’s political history is a case study in what capital buys when ideology is flexible. Through the first months of 2024, he donated more than $100,000 to the Democratic National Committee and $929,600 to Joe Biden’s reelection campaign. By April and June of 2025, he was sitting ringside with Trump at UFC fights. By July 2025, Paramount settled Trump’s CBS lawsuit for $16 million. Three weeks later the FCC approved the Skydance-Paramount merger. The merger closed in August 2025.

Paramount Skydance is now pursuing a $108.4 billion hostile takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. If the Ellisons prevail, they will control CBS, CNN, Warner Bros., HBO, and the UFC media rights simultaneously, all under a framework shaped by a president whose campaign they financed, whose lawsuit they settled, and whose birthday they are celebrating with a White House fight card.

What This Looks Like From Las Vegas

Las Vegas is not a passive backdrop to these arrangements. It is where the UFC was built, where Dana White lives, where TPS holders who clean the hotels and staff the buffets and hang the drywalls in the arenas where UFC events are held have been watching their legal status stripped away by an administration that these men helped elect and continue to legitimize.

The Culinary Union Local 226 represents more than 60,000 hospitality workers in Las Vegas and is one of the most immigrant-heavy labor organizations in the country. The same administration that UFC Freedom 250 will celebrate on June 14 terminated Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Salvadoran, Honduran, Venezuelan, and Haitian workers, many of whom live and work in Clark County.

None of the relationships described in this article are illegal. The question this article asks is not whether laws were broken. The question is what the accumulation of these relationships produces as policy, whose interests are served when the men with the most access to power also have the most to gain from its exercise, and who bears the cost when the answer to that question excludes them.

On June 14, the south lawn of the White House will host a fight. The president will celebrate his 80th birthday. The UFC will spend $60 million. Paramount+ will carry the broadcast. The Ellisons will control the platform. In Henderson, in North Las Vegas, in the east valley, people with legal work authorization who have lived in this country for decades will be watching from apartments they are afraid to leave, hoping a Supreme Court decision due in late June goes a different way than everything else has gone.