Wealth & Money Quote by Larry Ellison

Ellison’s line lands like a boardroom aside that’s been polished into a worldview: corporations are cleanly honest about profit, while government is framed as the parasitic middleman. The sentence structure does a lot of ideological work. “Primary goal” vs. “primary role” sounds symmetrical, almost civic-minded, but the parallelism is a trap. Profit is cast as purposeful and generative; taxation is reduced to “take a big chunk,” a phrase that’s deliberately blunt, vaguely aggrieved, and heavy on resentment. “Give it to others” finishes the move by leaving “others” undefined, inviting listeners to fill in stereotypes: freeloaders, bureaucrats, political opponents.

The subtext is classic Silicon Valley libertarianism with a sharper edge: markets create, states confiscate. It’s also a preemptive strike against regulation and redistribution, implying that any public claim on corporate wealth is arbitrary, not a negotiated social contract. In Ellison’s telling, government doesn’t build roads, fund research, enforce antitrust, or stabilize crises; it simply reallocates. That selective framing is the point. By shrinking the state’s function to extraction, he makes corporate self-interest sound like the only honest engine in the room.

Context matters: this isn’t a political theorist speaking, it’s a billionaire whose success depends on public infrastructure, educated labor, and a legal system that protects contracts and IP. The quote works because it’s emotionally legible - everyone recognizes the sensation of money leaving their hands - while quietly erasing the less visible ways government makes modern business possible.