Socialist Seattle Mayor PANICS As Oracle OFFICIALLY Eliminates 491 Washington Jobs!

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: - Today, we need to talk about something happening in Seattle that should make every American who has ever held a job sit up. Here's the scene. A baby is born in the Bronx to a 19-year-old single mother who can't keep him. At nine months old, pneumonia nearly kills him, and she ships him across the country to an aunt and uncle in a cramped two-bedroom apartment on the south side of Chicago. His adoptive father, a government clerk, looks him in the eye and tells him he'll never amount to anything. The kid is sharp. He's named Science Student of the Year his first year of college. Then his adoptive mother dies and he drops out. He tries another school and drops out of that one too. So he drives west to California with nothing but a knack for machines almost nobody understands yet. He bounces from job to job until he stumbles onto a database the government was paying to build. And in 1977, with $2,000, he starts a little company in a rented office. Over the next 50 years, he turns that company into one of the largest software businesses on the planet, tens of thousands of employees. For one day last fall, the single richest man alive. And then the blue states where he made that fortune, decided the fortune owed them more. So one by one, he started pulling his company out. Larry Ellison, that's the man we're talking about. He already moved the mothership out of California. And this spring, his company quietly did something in Seattle that erased 491 Washington jobs and landed in the lap of the city's brand new socialist mayor. But there's a single number in Seattle's own financial reports that nobody at City Hall will put on a poster. And it explains exactly why the jobs keep leaving. Maybe you're nowhere near Seattle right now, thinking this doesn't touch your life. The same playbook is already moving toward your state. Subscribe because the rabbit hole on this one runs deep. So let's get into it. Here's what actually happened. In the last week of March, 2026, Oracle filed something called a WARN Notice with Washington's Employment Security Department. A WARN Notice is the legal warning a large employer has to give before it wipes out a block of jobs. This one was blunt: 491 Washington workers, gone, effective June 1st. Software developers, network engineers, product and program managers. Most of them worked out of two Oracle offices in downtown Seattle, the Russell Investment Center, and a tower on Fifth Avenue, along with remote staff scattered across the state. Over 230 of them were software developers alone. The offices weren't closing. The cuts were permanent. No second chances. And at almost the exact same moment, eight blocks away, Seattle's new mayor was standing in front of a community crowd talking about how to pull more money out of the city's biggest companies. Her name is Katie Wilson, a self-described democratic socialist who took office in January after narrowly toppling the sitting mayor, and who had never held elected office in her life before this. So you've got 491 families getting a layoff notice on one side of downtown, and on the other side, the mayor pitching new taxes on the exact kind of company that just cut them. The question everyone wanted answered was simple. Why? Why cut 491 people in a year the company was printing money? Oracle did eventually explain itself. And the explanation is where this whole story turns. Here's the part of Larry Ellison's life nobody's reading about right now. Because before you can understand what Oracle just did, and why a layoff in Seattle says something about the whole country, you have to understand the man who built it. He was born in the Bronx in 1944 to a 19-year-old named Florence Spellman. She got pneumonia care for him the only way she could: by giving him up. His great-aunt and great-uncle in Chicago, Lillian and Lewis, adopted him into that two-bedroom apartment. Lewis was the one who told him he'd amount to nothing. Lillian was the one who believed in him. He was brilliant and restless. One science student of the year at the University of Illinois. And then Lillian died and the floor fell out. He dropped out. Enrolled at the University of Chicago. Dropped out again after a single semester. Then he pointed his car at California, landed in Berkeley, and took programming jobs wherever he could get them. At a company called Ampex, he worked on a database the CIA was paying for, codenamed Oracle. In 1977, he took that idea, $2,000 of his own money and two colleagues, and started a company in a rented room. It went public in 1986, one day before Microsoft. He ran it as CEO until 2014. And last fall, for a single day, he was the richest human being on Earth. The kid who'd never amount to anything. So why did Oracle cut 491 Seattle jobs? The company's answer was AI. One of Oracle's CEOs told investors in March that the company's own AI coding tools now let smaller engineering teams do more work faster, so it needs fewer engineers. And the layoff notice itself was careful to say the cuts were permanent and were not the result of moving the work somewhere else. So on paper, this isn't a tax story at all. It's an AI story. But hold that next to one fact. This is the same company, run by the same man, that in December of 2020 pulled its world headquarters clean out of California, out of Silicon Valley, where it had lived since 1977, and moved it to Austin, Texas, a state with no income tax. Then Ellison announced it's moving again to Nashville. This is a man with a documented habit of leaving. And he's not alone in leaving Washington. Jeff Bezos, who built Amazon out of a Seattle garage, moved himself to Florida in 2023. And by doing it before selling a pile of Amazon stock, he reportedly saved at least $610 million by dodging Washington's capital gains tax. Amazon itself has shifted roughly 14,000 of its people eight miles east to Bellevue, a city with no comparable tax at all. And the single biggest reason any of them have to drift out of Seattle is a tax that the new mayor personally invented. So why does a tax Katie Wilson built five years ago matter to 491 people losing their jobs today? Because of what it does to a city over time. The tax is called Jumpstart. And Wilson dreamed it up while she was running the Transit Riders Union, before she ever ran for office. It charges a company up to 2.4% on every single employee it pays more than $150,000 a year. Stack on top of that, a city business tax that can run two to four times higher than the suburbs, plus a brand new charge that takes 5% of any salary over a million dollars. For a tech company with thousands of high-paid engineers, that's millions of dollars a year in extra cost, just for the privilege of keeping those desks inside Seattle city limits. And when business groups pointed out the damage, Wilson rejected the idea that the tax had weakened the city's economy at all. Now here's the thing: Bellevue, 8 miles east, charges none of it. So the rational move for any big employer is to drift east. And they have. So step into the shoes of one of those 491 for a second. You moved to Seattle for the Oracle job. You bought a place near the office. June 1st, you're gone. And AI made us more efficient doesn't cover your mortgage. You start hunting for the next job. And you notice something. The new postings aren't downtown anymore. They're in Bellevue. They're in Austin. They're remote from anywhere. And the little lunch counter under your old tower, the one that survived on a thousand hungry engineers every weekday, is quietly counting how many regulars it just lost for good. Remember the number I told you was sitting in Seattle's own books? Here it is. This June, the Downtown Seattle Association, the city's own downtown business group, released a report on what's happened since Jumpstart took effect. Downtown Seattle has lost about 30,000 jobs since 2020. And the taxable value of its office buildings has fallen 48%. Almost half. Sit with that for a second. Nearly one in three downtown jobs gone. Half the value of the buildings that pay for the city's services gone. And here's the part that turns it from a tragedy into an indictment. Over those same years, Bellevue, with no comparable tax, added jobs and watched its office values rise 7%. Same pandemic, same work from home shock, same tech downturn. Opposite outcome. The biggest difference between the two cities was the tax. And it gets worse. Jumpstart was sold to the public as dedicated money to build affordable housing. The city has since pulled around $201 million of it out of that pot and into the general fund to patch ordinary budget holes and dissolved the very committee that was supposed to watch where the money went. The city's general fund has nearly doubled in a decade to about $2 billion. And it still isn't enough. There's a budget gap of up to $140 million coming. So what's the mayor's plan for a shrinking tax base? More taxes. At that March forum, Wilson said her team is hard at work hunting for new ways to tax the wealthy and tax big business. The same downtown that just lost 30,000 jobs and 491 more from Oracle. And her answer is to make the cost of staying even higher. That's not a recovery plan. That's a city trying to squeeze more juice from a fruit it keeps stepping on. So what's the mayor actually doing about a downtown that's lost 30,000 jobs? Doubling down. Wilson defends Jumpstart hard, saying that without it, Seattle would have been in a world of hurt during the pandemic. And yet, in nearly the same breath that she's pushing for more, she admitted the obvious out loud. That piling it on is "not good to give them an incentive to go over to Bellevue." She knows. She said it herself. And she's doing it anyway. But here's where Larry Ellison doesn't get to play the hero either. Oracle didn't cut those 491 people because it was hurting. It cut them in a year its stock was smashing record highs, and its founder briefly became the richest man on the planet. One laid-off worker pointed out the cuts came right after the stock hit an all-time high. So look at who's left holding the bag. The mayor taxes the jobs out of the city. The company cuts the jobs while it's swimming in money. Both of them protect their own position just fine. The 491 and that lunch counter downstairs get nothing from either side. And this is not just a Seattle story. In New York, another self-described democratic socialist, Zoran Mamdani, won City Hall on the same promise to tax the rich and the biggest companies harder. The pattern is identical everywhere it shows up. High taxes, fiscal strain, employers drifting to the suburbs or the sunbelt, and a politician at the podium swearing that businesses can afford more. If your city is chasing an affordability crisis by taxing the people who sign your neighbor's paychecks, that playbook is already heading your way. So let's bring it full circle. A kid from a two-bedroom apartment in Chicago, told to his face that he would never amount to anything, builds one of the biggest companies on earth. And the real lesson he picked up along the way wasn't how to build it. It was when to leave. He left California. He's trimming Seattle. And a man worth hundreds of billions of dollars can afford to do exactly that. The 491 people his company left behind cannot. Here's the bottom line. You cannot tax the companies that fund your city into staying. And you cannot lay off the workers who depend on them and call it progress. When the jobs leave, the tax base walks out the door with them. And whoever's still standing gets handed the bill. Whether you're in Seattle or watching from a state that still thinks this can't happen where you live, it can. The same forces are lining up in city after city. So watch which way the jobs move, because they'll tell you the truth long before any politician at a podium does. So tell me in the comments: Is Seattle's tax model saving the city or strangling it? And if you're there, are you watching it happen in real time? Let's get into it below. Hit subscribe for more of the stories that reach your paycheck before they ever reach the news. The numbers don't lie. The podiums do.