‘Serious player’: The secretive 80-year-old billionaire in Trump’s inner circle

Four of the world’s five richest men had prime seats at Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Silicon Valley tycoons Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg sat shoulder-to-shoulder at the event while Bernard Arnault, the French fashion magnate, was nearby, behind Barack Obama.

Rupert Murdoch and Larry Ellison at the White House this week to witness Trump announce a US sovereign wealth fund. Credit: AP

The missing man was Larry Ellison. The 80-year-old, who rounds out the top five wealth list, was notably absent from the pageantry of the inauguration as the world’s cameras were trained on Washington.

But the founder of the database giant Oracle has been a regular presence by Trump’s side.

Ellison, whose $US194 billion ($308 billion) net worth makes him the world’s fourth-richest person on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, was inside the White House the day after the inauguration as Trump announced a $US500 billion investment in artificial intelligence data centres.

On Monday, he sat next to Rupert Murdoch to witness the president announcing a US sovereign wealth fund. “Larry is one of the most serious players anywhere in the world,” Trump said.

Ellison, who was also a fixture at Mar-a-Lago as the incoming president put together his plans, may be the tech billionaire with the second-most influence in the White House, behind Trump’s more visible ally Musk.

As with Oracle itself, Ellison is not a household name outside of Silicon Valley. He rarely gives interviews and has only tweeted twice, despite having invested $US1 billion in Musk’s takeover of X.

“You won’t find people to talk to for this,” one associate said, when approached for an interview. “He doesn’t like to be in the public eye.”

Still, once you become aware of Ellison you start seeing him everywhere. He stands to have a central role in Trump’s approach to artificial intelligence (AI), America’s media landscape and the fate of TikTok.

Ellison wields a lot of influence over Trump. Credit: Bloomberg

While, unlike Musk, he has no formal role in the new administration, he has regularly sat in on meetings with the president’s advisers.

Ellison belongs to a different generation of Silicon Valley tycoons than today’s most recognisable names. As with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Ellison made his mark as a technology entrepreneur in the 1970s.

During an early job at the electronics company Ampex, he worked on a database project for the CIA that involved linking different types of computer records together in what became known as Oracle.

Ellison and two co-workers quit to turn the idea into a business and, after incorporating it as the less-catchy Software Development Laboratories, he later renamed the company after the CIA project.

Musk may attract a great deal of attention but the other tech billionaire in the room may have just as much to gain from the new Trump era.

In the rapidly computerising corporate world, powered by Microsoft computers and Intel microchips, Oracle provided the databases that allowed these machines to access and record information.

The concept proved a winning one. The explosion of data in recent decades and the need to store and process it, combined with a series of ambitious acquisitions, has made Oracle a $US480 billion company. Ellison’s 41 per cent stake is valued at $US195 billion.

While he may not have courted the limelight, Ellison has pursued a series of flamboyant endeavours that have drawn attention to him.

A licenced pilot, he once picked a fight with the US government because he was not allowed to fly an imported Russian fighter jet, claiming “it’s considered a firearm”.

In 1998, he skippered the winning yacht on the Sydney to Hobart yacht race (Murdoch’s eldest son, Lachlan, was part of the crew). In 2012, he paid $US300 million to acquire 98 per cent of Hawaii’s sixth-largest island.

Ellison has been married five times, recently wedding 33-year-old Jolin Zhu. News of the nuptials emerged when the University of Michigan, where Zhu studied, thanked Ellison for his help signing a star quarterback.

As with much of Silicon Valley, Ellison has become increasingly active in politics in recent years – and has been on his own Trumpian conversion. Ellison was a prominent Bill Clinton backer but later supported Republican candidates. He grew closer to Trump during the Republican’s first term and allowed his California estate to be used for a fundraiser in 2020.

The fundraiser led to protests from Oracle staff but his support became more controversial when it was reported that Ellison had taken part in a Trump phone call discussing attempts to overturn the 2020 election result.

Ellison later backed Tim Scott, a short-lived challenger to Trump for the Republican nomination and, according to reports, sought to have the senator installed as Trump’s running mate.

Ellison is close with Elon Musk and is believed to be on of Tesla’s biggest shareholders. Credit: Reuters

Although he was unsuccessful, Ellison has remained ingratiated with Trump’s team, a dynamic bolstered by a strong relationship with Musk. Ellison is believed to be Tesla’s second-largest individual shareholder after Musk and sat on the company’s board until 2022.

The same year, he spontaneously agreed to back Musk’s takeover of Twitter (after Musk asked “what dollar size” Ellison might put up, the Oracle founder casually texted back “a billion ... or whatever you recommend” before Musk pushed for $US2 billion).

Ellison’s political alliances have appeared more practical than driven by ideology. He has a close relationship with Sir Tony Blair, and has outlined plans to donate hundreds of millions of dollars to the former prime minister’s global institute, something of a hit to the billionaire’s MAGA credentials.

Sceptics have suggested that Sir Tony’s interests in AI and digital health records might align with Oracle’s, although improving medicine has long been an Ellison mission. He has also funded a $US1 billion Institute of Technology in Oxford to commercialise scientific research.

Closeness to the White House might have other advantages. According to the New York Post, the billionaire’s support for Stargate, a $US500 billion AI project championed by Trump, might help push through an $US8 billion takeover of Hollywood studio Paramount by Skydance, a company run by Ellison’s son, David.

The bigger prize, however, might be TikTok. Oracle is reportedly in discussions about a bid to take over the video app’s US operations as its Chinese owner ByteDance comes under pressure to sell the company. Oracle already runs the data centre where TikTok’s US data is firewalled and it was in talks to buy the company’s US operations five years ago.

“I’d like Larry to buy it,” Trump said last month.

Musk may attract a great deal of attention but the other tech billionaire in the room may have just as much to gain from the new Trump era.

Telegraph, London

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