Elon Musk may have blown up his relationship with Donald Trump like a Tesla battery that caught fire, but there’s another centibillionaire out there with deep influence in the Oval Office: Larry Ellison.
The Oracle cofounder — who drooled last year that omnipresent AI surveillance will ensure “citizens will be on their best behavior” — is now the second richest man in the world, with a net worth north of $350 billion. He commands a business empire that spans everything from cloud computing to the news you watch. Ellison’s so influential, in fact, that a Trump adviser admitted to a Wired reporter that he’s literally a “shadow president of the United States.”
“He does a brilliant job of being, let’s call it the anti-Elon,” another Trump associate in the AI industry told Wired in a new story. “He’s not kind of feared directly, but people in the know in Washington know he has some tremendous pull.”
Despite being enormously wealthy for ages, Ellison’s rise as an influential shadow orchestrator is a bit of a left turn. Three decades ago, Vanity Fair was calling Ellison Silicon Valley’s “most notorious playboy.” He burned through several marriages and reportedly flew fighter jets that he owned in mock dogfights with his son. He also had an appetite for buying colossal yachts, and even entire Hawaiian islands.
But for the past decade or so, the now 81-year-old has managed to largely stay out of the limelight, becoming a regular GOP donor after Obama’s presidency disillusioned him of his loyalty to the Democrats, according to a source that knows the family. (Prior to his changing teams, he was a “big fan of Bill Clinton.”)
Today, “Larry has found himself in this elder statesman role where, without saying anything, he can have a real impact,” that source told the magazine. “And it looks like the strategy is working.”
Oracle’s computer servers underpin a lot of the tech and AI industry, and it’s a major player in Trump’s $500 billion “Stargate” deal to build AI infrastructure in the US. This month, it secured a $300 billion contract with OpenAI to supply it with mammoth amounts of computing power over the next five years.
Ellison’s also about to have major pull at TikTok, which a vast proportion of Americans use to get their news, not to mention placate their brains. In a Trump-backed deal to sell the US-version of the Chinese app to several American investors — one of them being Oracle — Ellison’s software company will get to control and redesign the app’s omnipotent algorithm that determines everything that nearly a third of US adults see on there. Did we forget to mention that Oracle has already been hosting TikTok on its servers for years?
With the help of his family, his role as a media mogul will only grow. Larry’s son David recently bought out Paramount and folded it into his dad’s media company Skydance. Now it’s “Paramount Skydance,” which owns CBS News. If Paramount Skydance successfully buys out Warner Bros Discovery, as it’s currently gearing up to do, CNN will be next to enter the Ellison fold. It’s an unsettling prospect, given that Trump and his allies have been ruthless with shutting down his critics in news and media.
Wired summed it up ominously: “The Ellison family is cornering the market on attention and data the way the Vanderbilts did railroads and the Rockefellers did oil.”
Politics moves quickly these days though, and Ellison isn’t getting any younger. A lot can rapidly change. Not too long ago, we were hearing about Musk’s “shadow rule.” Now, we’re handing it to overlords elites who haven’t had their brains completely rotted out by Twitter.
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