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This week has demonstrated that the tech “broligarch” who’s most influenced President Donald Trump’s second administration isn’t Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, or Marc Andreessen—it’s Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, the 80-year-old software tycoon who recently became the second-richest man in the world.
Just look at everything that’s gone his way. On Thursday evening, the Federal Communications Commission finally voted to approve Paramount’s $8.4 billion merger with fellow entertainment firm Skydance Media. The controversial, long-awaited deal only came about thanks to Paramount’s appeals to this administration: settling a baseless lawsuit that Trump brought against 60 Minutes for “deceptively” editing its Kamala Harris interview, pressuring subsidiary CBS News to shift its “balance” in a right-wing direction, and canceling presidential foe and beloved comedian Stephen Colbert’s highly rated late-night talk show.
Of note: Skydance is owned by Ellison’s son, David, who personally met with both Trump and FCC Chair Brendan Carr to get the deal done. The elder Ellison is covering most of the cash to close the Skydance-Paramount merger, which will give him significant control over the new company and a chance to carry out, as he detailed in federal filings, a wholesale transformation of CBS in his vision—including broadcasts of complimentary PSAs for Trump administration initiatives.
When Carr announced the merger approval, he positively affirmed “Skydance’s commitment to make significant changes at the once storied CBS broadcast network,” including the impending hire of an “ombudsman” who’ll monitor CBS News broadcasts for “bias” as the overall company slashes its diversity, equity, and inclusion guidelines. Said Trump himself of his “friend” Larry Ellison: “I think he’s going to run CBS really well, and I think he’s making a good deal to buy it.”
Through this brazenly corrupt arrangement, the U.S. president has granted one of his pals uninhibited control over a longtime bastion of mainstream, fact-based news, which he openly intends to bend toward his conservative vision. And that’s just one of the ways Trump is helping Larry Ellison become the most powerful and not-so-secretly influential tech mogul in the country.
Oracle, which Larry still runs as chief technology officer and board chairman, is also in talks with David Ellison’s Skydance for a major deal that would see the latter pay the former $100 million a year to run all of Paramount’s tech through Oracle’s valuable cloud-computing software. Skydance already pays Oracle $2.2 million a year for its cloud and platform products, and the FCC explicitly signed off on David Ellison’s plan to run all of Paramount’s and Skydance’s on the same cloud tech, which will happen to be provided by Oracle. In addition, David promised to improve the recommendation algorithms on Paramount+ through artificial intelligence—a type of tech that Oracle specializes in. Larry himself even appeared at the White House in January for Trump’s announcement of a $500 billion A.I.-investment initiative known as Project Stargate, which enlists Oracle to build out masses of data centers across Texas.
There are other ways Trump is ensuring that Ellison benefits from the A.I. race. The day before the FCC approved Skydance-Paramount, the president hosted a kickoff event at the White House for his AI Action Plan, a new federal framework for tech regulation (or lack thereof). Much of the plan reads like a Christmas gift list for Larry Ellison and Oracle in particular, including overriding environmental protections to construct those Stargate-style A.I. data-center campuses, prioritizing contracts with “free speech”–focused A.I. firms like Elon Musk’s xAI (in which Ellison and Oracle are both invested), integrating A.I. infrastructure into the Pentagon, and centralizing the government’s massive data sets (a special focus of Oracle’s).
Further, the Trump administration’s plans for undermining China’s A.I. ambitions also involve kowtowing to Ellison—by using him to force some American control over TikTok.
The megapopular video app has been a motif in the Trump-Ellison relationship for a while now. In 2020, when Trump first demanded that TikTok be banned from American app stores until it found a U.S.-based buyer, Ellison placated the president by fundraising for his reelection campaign. Trump then blessed Oracle as the rightful leader of a new “TikTok Global” entity that, in partnership with Walmart and other American investors, would move the app’s infrastructure stateside and relegate TikTok’s parent company, China’s Bytedance, to minority-owner status. That was all scuttled when Joe Biden won the fall election and took a different approach to the platform.
But, ever since Trump returned to office, he’s been eager to get a TikTok deal done, even though negotiations have dragged on long past his own self-imposed deadlines. Through it all, Ellison has again remained by his side, with Oracle consistently being named as the owner-in-waiting for a U.S.-controlled TikTok, in spite of Bytedance’s denials. Such a transaction would likely force the app to divest its powerful “secret sauce” algorithm and China-based data servers—meaning that Oracle would gain control over the newly customized A.I. and data systems for American TikTok. Notably, the platform already stores a lot of user data in Oracle’s Texas-based servers, but an out-and-out sale would mean that foreign users’ TikTok data would no longer be housed with Oracle. American TikTok’s American algorithm will be trained by American user data.
From that perspective, you can view the AI Action Plan with its emphasis on “American AI” as yet another blessing for Ellison’s TikTok ambitions. Furthermore, you can view all these developments as a direct payoff for Ellison for his longtime investment in Trump. Not least since Ellison remains Oracle’s largest shareholder—and Oracle’s stock value has been popping thanks to the Trump White House’s favorable A.I. regulations and deals. That stock jump is a big factor in why Ellison has become the second-wealthiest person in the world.
It’s also worth emphasizing that Larry Ellison’s journey to this level of wealth and power—both political and cultural—would not have happened had he not solidified his relationship with Trump long before any of these other tech CEOs came to embrace him. (Peter Thiel is perhaps the sole exception here.) After Donald Trump was first elected president in 2016, Oracle CEO Safra Catz joined the executive committee for Trump’s transition team and occasionally advised him during that first term, while still working with Ellison. In November 2020, after Ellison’s prior fundraisers failed to boost Trump to reelection, the tech titan joined a group call with Sean Hannity and Sen. Lindsey Graham, among others, to discuss how to contest the election results. After the Jan. 6 insurrection, Oracle’s political action committee pledged to no longer back the politicians who’d objected to the Electoral College’s certification of Biden’s victory—only to quickly turn on that promise during the 2022 midterms, when it backed election deniers like Reps. Steve Scalise, Jim Banks, Jim Jordan, Ralph Norman, and Darrell Issa. That same year, Ellison also invested in Musk’s far-right Twitter takeover.
In addition, the multibillionaire began positioning himself closer to Mar-a-Lago, investing amply in a small island town close to Trump’s Florida residence and transforming it into a hub for the country’s wealthiest to congregate. As such, although he initially backed Sen. Tim Scott for the 2024 GOP nomination, it was easy for Ellison to begin dining with Trump again as the ex-president’s candidacy seemed assured—and for Oracle to begin working with the Heritage Foundation to compile a database of potential Trump appointees who’d be unfailingly loyal. Ellison also joined the Silicon Valley adviser army that descended upon Mar-a-Lago when Trump won reelection, then went on to cheer Musk’s DOGE rampage and propose that all “national data” be put into a singular database that would feed an A.I. model—a vision that may be in reach thanks to the action plan, whose data-concentration goals would build upon DOGE’s addition of A.I. to various government functions.
Now, just six months into Trump’s term, Ellison has procured for himself a sweeping empire, ruling over acres’ worth of A.I. infrastructure, gaining a megasized media arm for himself via Paramount-Skydance, potentially winning another powerful media apparatus with TikTok, and seeing his own ideologies and goals reflected by a friendly White House. The Trump 2.0 era has been spectacular for “one rich asshole called Larry Ellison”—mostly because he’s done so much to shape it.
