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. Whether his donation fell below the $200 disclosure threshold, was structured through a corporate vehicle, or was recorded under a different name is not publicly established. What is established is his presence at every major Trump event across two administrations and his role as one of the president’s most visible public validators.

White’s validation has not been passive. He stood beside Trump as Trump mused publicly about creating a migrant fighting league, telling a rally crowd he had pitched the idea directly to White as a way to monetize undocumented immigrants who Trump described as tough and nasty. 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 UFC’s audience, which skews working class and male, heard its CEO laugh alongside a president who was describing their neighbors, coworkers, and in many Las Vegas cases their family members as potential entertainment product.

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 deal restructured how tens of millions of UFC fans access the content they previously paid for fight by fight. It also tied White’s commercial future directly to the Ellison family’s media empire. White House access followed the commercial alignment. 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. He owns more than 40 percent of Oracle’s stock and serves as its executive chairman and chief technology officer.

Ellison’s political trajectory tracks the money. He donated $3 million to a Mitt Romney super PAC in 2012, $5 million to Marco Rubio’s super PAC in 2016, and more than $30 million since 2021 to a super PAC that primarily backed Tim Scott’s presidential bid. During the 2022 election cycle, OpenSecrets ranked him 11th on its federal megadonor list, having disclosed $31 million in contributions to outside spending groups supporting conservative candidates. He hosted a six-figure-per-person fundraiser for Trump at his Rancho Mirage, California estate in 2020. He joined a November 2020 call with Trump staffers and allies, including Senator Lindsey Graham and Fox News host Sean Hannity, to discuss strategies for contesting the election results, according to the Washington Post. His son David later told journalist Kara Swisher that everyone in the family believed the 2020 election was free and fair.

The payoff under Trump’s second term has been without precedent. On January 21, 2025, Trump’s second day back in office, Ellison stood at the White House alongside the president to announce the Stargate Project, a $500 billion artificial intelligence 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, according to Truthout’s October 2025 analysis. Ellison was named to Trump’s Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology alongside Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Jensen Huang, and other technology executives. Trump publicly endorsed Ellison’s effort to acquire a stake in TikTok, saying he’d like Larry to buy it. Oracle was ultimately positioned as the security provider overseeing TikTok’s algorithms in the United States. 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 rather than rhetorical. Oracle’s lobbying operation, which spent eight figures in 2024 and deployed 64 lobbyists across 11 firms in the first half of 2025, targeted the Department of Homeland Security among its primary government contacts, according to OpenSecrets. Oracle’s government data contracts, which include a long-standing relationship with immigration enforcement agencies, position the company as a commercial beneficiary of expanded enforcement operations. The same data infrastructure Ellison has described as enabling constant recording of citizen behavior, a surveillance architecture he publicly endorsed in a September 2024 company presentation, is the architecture that immigration authorities use to track, identify, and locate people targeted for deportation. 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, tens of thousands to state Democratic parties, and $929,600 to Joe Biden’s reelection campaign. In April 2024, his production company Skydance made a formal bid to acquire Paramount Global. The merger review process became entangled almost immediately with Trump’s lawsuit against Paramount’s CBS News division, which alleged that CBS had interfered in the 2024 election through its editing of a September 2024 interview with Kamala Harris.

By April and June of 2025, David Ellison was sitting ringside with Trump at UFC fights. By July 2025, Paramount settled Trump’s CBS lawsuit for $16 million, without an apology, without any finding of wrongdoing, and without any connection to the merger, according to Paramount’s public statements. Three weeks after the settlement, the FCC approved the Skydance-Paramount merger. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s approval statement included conditions requiring CBS to hire an ombudsman to monitor for bias and to eliminate its DEI programs, conditions that were imposed on a news organization through a regulatory proceeding triggered by a presidential lawsuit that was settled, not adjudicated. The merger closed in August 2025.

Trump claimed publicly that Skydance had agreed to provide him with $20 million in advertising and public service announcements as part of the deal. David Ellison declined to comment on that claim when pressed by reporters. House Democrats including Representatives Jamie Raskin and Frank Pallone opened investigations into whether the settlement and the regulatory approval constituted a bribery arrangement. Those investigations have not produced formal charges. What the merger did produce was David Ellison’s installation of Bari Weiss, a conservative opinion journalist who founded The Free Press, as editor-in-chief of CBS News. Trump praised the hiring publicly.

Paramount Skydance is now pursuing a $108.4 billion hostile takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. Larry Ellison has provided an irrevocable personal guarantee of $40.4 billion in equity financing for the bid. Ellison advisers told Variety privately that the Ellisons are the only viable bidders because rivals, including Netflix, face regulatory obstacles that the Ellisons do not. Trump publicly pressured Netflix to remove former Obama administration official Susan Rice from its board, telling the company to comply or pay the consequences. Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos brushed it off publicly. The bidding war continues. 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, which represents more than 60,000 hospitality workers in Las Vegas and is one of the most immigrant-heavy labor organizations in the country, endorsed Joe Biden in 2024 and has consistently opposed the immigration enforcement posture of the Trump administration. The same administration that UFC Freedom 250 will celebrate on June 14 is the administration that terminated Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Salvadoran, Honduran, Venezuelan, and Haitian workers, many of whom live and work in Clark County. Two U.S. citizens have been killed in immigration enforcement operations under this administration, according to reporting cited by the Guardian. These are not abstractions. They are the conditions on the ground in the city where Dana White built his empire and where the UFC’s biggest events regularly take place.

Trump mused about a migrant fighting league at a rally crowd that laughed. Dana White confirmed the conversation and called it a joke. The fighters who compete in the UFC include numerous immigrants and children of immigrants, including several who have spoken publicly against the administration’s enforcement posture. The promotional machine that packages their labor into a $7.7 billion media deal is run by a man who stood beside the president while he described their communities as entertainment fodder.

None of the relationships described in this article are illegal. Political donations are legal. Regulatory approvals are routine. Media mergers are standard commercial transactions. Government contracts are awarded through processes that have rules. 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. Dana White will call it the greatest card ever assembled. 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.