Larry Ellison Is a ‘Shadow President’ in Donald Trump’s America

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.

The Ellison family is cornering the market on attention and data the way the Vanderbilts did railroads and the Rockefellers did oil.

Despite all of that, many of the president’s advisers and senior aides know little to nothing about the man atop it all.

“I’ve never really heard anyone talk about him, tbh,” one of Trump’s advisers tells me in a text message. “Not someone who really comes up all that much.”

Larry Ellison didn’t used to be one of the boring Silicon Valley billionaires.

Ellison has long demonstrated a penchant for flash and a longing for the spotlight—buying 98 percent of the Hawaiian island of Lanai, attempting to acquire fighter jets from other countries, flying on unique private jets, sponsoring a yacht racing team, funding an international sailing competition, and earning a reputation decades ago as a womanizer—even if it’s been diminished in Trump 2.0.

The 1997 biography The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison wastes no time answering the titular question posed by author Mike Wilson, who got extensive interview time with the future centibillionaire: “God doesn’t think he’s Larry Ellison.”

He may not be seen as God inside the White House, but at the very least, my Trumpworld sources tell me, Ellison isn’t like most politically ambitious billionaires, even beyond his more staid business interests.

For insiders, one of the most intriguing things is that he scouts his own political talent.

“There’s not a Larry political orbit like the one Elon has set up,” one Republican in Trumpworld familiar with Ellison’s political activities tells me. Normally, veterans of national campaigns and Capitol Hill can earn a lot of money by giving the ultra-wealthy the lay of the land, doing almost all of the legwork shy of signing the check. “Larry,” this person says, “is very involved in calling those shots.”

A source who knows the Ellisons told me Larry began to drift away from the Democrats and toward the Republicans over the course of Barack Obama’s terms in office.

“He was a big fan of Democratic politics, big fan of Bill Clinton,” the source who knows the Ellison family says. “He did a lot of fundraisers, is close to a lot of liberal politicians. And then Obama fucked up.” (Ellison gave $3 million to a pro–Mitt Romney super PAC in the 2012 cycle. He gave modestly to to the Democratic National Committee when Clinton was president, and while he hedged his bets with donations to Republicans, he was also once quoted as saying, “We should have amended the Constitution to elect Bill Clinton to a third term.")

A staunch supporter of Israel and its military, Ellison perceived Obama to be hostile to the nation, according to the source who knows the family, as the president’s relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu deteriorated. (According to Haaretz, Ellison once offered Netanyahu a board seat at Oracle. Ellison denied the report. A representative for the former president declined to comment.) Early in his conservative arc, Ellison donated to a PAC supporting Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign and struck those who knew him at the time as a burgeoning moderate Republican.

“Maybe 10 years ago, he was like, ‘I want Marco Rubio to be president,’” the same source says.

Many players first started hearing of Ellison in the lead-up to the 2024 Republican presidential primary. At that point, after years of donating to both parties, Ellison was seen internally as doing Trump a small favor by pledging his financial support to senator Tim Scott, a Republican of South Carolina. My sources considered Scott to be a solid VP contender, if a slight long shot. He was seen as harmless at worst, and at best a potential insurance policy in the event of a prolonged primary campaign—a potential spoiler candidate capable of pulling support from rivals, particularly fellow South Carolinian Nikki Haley.

“His involvement with GOP politicians like Tim Scott was the appetizer,” a second Republican familiar with Ellison’s political activities tells me, “and Trump is the main course.”

Ellison, who’s almost two years older than Trump, has been setting the groundwork for the successor to his family empire. The weight of his legacy falls on the shoulders of his 42-year-old son, David.

Once an aspiring actor, David played a key role alongside James Franco in the 2006 WWI drama Flyboys—which he also partially financed. When his onscreen career didn’t take off, he figured he would be better not just behind the camera but up in the C-suite.

David’s known political donations have been entirely to Democrats. But he is not known for having the same tactical nous as Larry.

“This is the exhausting part of it,” a campaign staffer with knowledge of donor outreach involving the Ellison family tells me, describing David as someone who carried himself with the confidence of a business tycoon despite, at the point they interacted, only having been born to one. “I’ve dealt with a lot of people through my career who are nepo babies. Some of them feel like they’re moguls in their own right.”

This source—who, like others, requested anonymity to speak candidly about the political influence of the Ellison family—said the nepo babies of the ultra wealthy tend to fall into two camps: There are those with pet policy issues and a desire to shape their legacy through some notion of making a difference, and there are those who want to accumulate power and influence for their own sake.

“He was always part of that latter group.”

Representatives for Larry and David Ellison did not return requests for comment.

While my Trumpworld and Republican sources who have dealt with Larry Ellison’s political activities say they take him to be more or less a true believer on most of their key issues at this point—most notably seen in his support for the Israeli military, a focus on improving “blue cities,” and his financial interests in the AI industry—far less is known about his heir apparent.

With a still vaguely described domestic iteration of TikTok and scores of TV channels from news to entertainment coming into the family’s portfolio, it remains to be seen whether David Ellison will become a Murdoch-type figure, setting the agenda for the modern GOP and in control of properties occupying the top spot in the conservative media ecosystem in the way Fox News did for the past three decades.

But with the widely rumored acquisition of the right-leaning media startup Free Press and reported interest in tapping cofounder Bari Weiss to run CBS News—and even, potentially down the line, a merger with CNN—he’s already begun making Murdoch-type moves. (Weiss did not respond to a request for comment.)

“David always felt like, oh let’s play both sides,” the campaign staffer who dealt with him as a donor says. “It was always a little bit like pulling teeth … to get him to engage, but he did and he did so willingly.”

“It wasn’t sketchy in any way, it was very much aboveboard,” they continue. “It felt less like trying to be a good citizen and more like, ‘What’s going to benefit me?’”

As for Larry, the way he has managed to cool his bad-boy image from the 1990s and find a way to be at the center of power in Trump 2.0 has certainly benefited him and put the family legacy on the strongest possible footing.

“Larry has found himself in this elder statesman role where, without saying anything, he can have a real impact,” the source who knows the Ellisons tells me. “And it looks like the strategy is working.”

This is an edition of Jake Lahut’s Inner Loop newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.