In Trumpworld, Larry Ellison gets more credit than anyone else for operating in the shadows.
Over a drink earlier in Donald Trump’s second term, one of the president’s advisers described the Oracle cofounder, chairman, and chief technology officer to me as a literal “shadow president of the United States,” if not necessarily the shadow president.
In the months since, Ellison, who’s been trading the title of “richest man alive” with Elon Musk lately, has begun to live up to the moniker. Musk is almost starting over from scratch, working his way back into Trump’s good graces by seeming to pretend that whole ugly breakup and half-baked ploy to form a third party never happened. Rupert Murdoch is 94 years old and ceding more control of his media empire to his son Lachlan. Peter Thiel is running around interrogating the topic of the biblical antichrist.
As nice as it is to be a billionaire, it’s even better to be one flying below most people’s radar in Trump’s Washington.
“He does a brilliant job of being, let’s call it the anti-Elon,” a Trumpworld source in the AI industry tells me, referring to Ellison. “He’s not kind of feared directly, but people in the know in Washington know he has some tremendous pull.”
With his family dynasty growing, Ellison, who at 81 is aging just as fast as anyone, could become as powerful as some combinations of those men—if he’s not already there. And yet even many of my Trumpworld sources don’t know much about him, in part because, as some concede, he benefits from the fundamental lack of sexiness of his business of cloud applications and databases and servers.
Given the unprecedented power and influence Ellison and his family are amassing, their lack of visibility may be about to change, no matter how much my sources in Trumpworld privately say they want more stealth from their tech billionaires in the post-Elon landscape.
In an age where human attention is perhaps the world’s most valuable commodity, the Ellisons could be in charge of almost everything a modern-day pseudo robber baron could want by the end of this year or soon after. I spoke with sources who have dealt with Ellison—as well as others who know his son, David—to get a sense of how he operates. And he operates a lot lately; the Trump administration has essentially sent a fair amount of business his way after Ellison established himself as a reliable, if sparing, GOP donor and fundraiser over the 2020 and 2024 cycles.
There’s his pending dominance over vertical video with a key role in the proposed new ownership consortium for the US version of TikTok, for which Oracle’s servers already provide hosting. There’s airwave domination, with a news and entertainment behemoth under his son’s control following the merger of David’s Skydance and Paramount—which might possibly include the keys to not only CBS but also CNN, if Skydance actually puts in a bid and succeeds in a potential acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The empire spans from the sweaty floor of the octagon after acquiring US broadcast rights to the Ultimate Fighting Championship (also under Paramount) all the way to the clay soil of Abilene, Texas, home of OpenAI’s Stargate data center project led by Oracle and Softbank. Oracle is also linked to a $100 billion deal with Nvidia and OpenAI announced Monday.