Larry Ellison didn’t attend the high-profile White House events this spring that drew other tech billionaires. But the Oracle co-founder has developed a more-private friendship with President Trump built in large part on his financial support, according to a report Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal that drew on people familiar with the donations, court records, and public filings.
Ellison, 81, gave roughly $45 million to a political nonprofit group that backed Trump’s 2024 election efforts, the people said. Because the group is structured as a tax-exempt political nonprofit under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, it is not required to disclose its donors. Ellison has also given millions more to Trump-aligned groups since the election, according to the people, with some of the money going to Trump’s legacy initiatives in Washington, D.C.
The Journal reported that Ellison’s donations — the largest single injection of capital in the 2024 cycle from any one donor, according to the people — helped cement a relationship that has produced tangible business benefits for both Ellison and his son, David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount Skydance.
The day after Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025, Ellison was at the White House as Oracle was named the architectural backbone of the Stargate project, a $500 billion private-sector initiative to build AI data centers. When Ellison arrived without his passport or government ID, the president personally intervened to get him through Secret Service screening, telling security “everyone knows who Larry is,” according to the report.
Later in 2025, Oracle was part of an investor group that took control of TikTok’s U.S. operations in a deal brokered by the U.S. government.
Federal disclosure filings show that Trump’s investment accounts actively traded Oracle shares this year, including a sale worth at least $1 million in January and a purchase worth at least $1 million in March. The Trump Organization has said the president’s investments are independently managed and that he is not involved in selecting or approving trades.
Trump’s personal investment portfolio likewise increased trading activity earlier this year, as MSI has reported, with the president disclosing thousands of individual stock trades, including positions in Nvidia and Apple. White House spokesman Kush Desai said Trump is “committed to working with every American business and business leader.” Oracle declined to comment.
The Ellison family’s financial and personal alignment with Trump has been years in the making. Larry Ellison initially backed other Republicans in 2016 and 2024 — including Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who Ellison wanted as Trump’s running mate. Ellison told Trump his financial support would hinge on the vice-presidential pick, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump chose JD Vance instead.
Ellison recalibrated quickly. By the summer of 2024, with Trump gaining momentum, Ellison made the $45 million donation, making it one of the largest single injections of capital in the cycle, the people said.
The relationship dates to about 10 years ago, when Ellison’s longtime No. 2, Safra Catz, connected the two men. Catz was on Trump’s transition team in late 2016 and served as an adviser during his first term. Ellison hosted a fundraiser for Trump at his California estate in February 2020, though he didn’t attend.
Less than two weeks after Trump lost the 2020 election, Ellison was on a call with Trump allies — including Sen. Lindsey Graham, attorney Jay Sekulow, and Fox News host Sean Hannity — to discuss strategies to contest the results, according to emails cited in court records. One goal was to find a legal pathway to invalidate or recount ballots in swing states, including Pennsylvania and Georgia.
David Ellison, whose company Skydance merged with CBS owner Paramount and later rebranded as Paramount Skydance, has also directly benefited from the family’s proximity to Trump. In April 2025, he met with Trump at a UFC event, where they were photographed ringside with Elon Musk.
As he awaited regulatory approval for the Paramount-Skydance merger, David Ellison called Barbara Byrne, a Paramount director, to express his frustration with the drawn-out settlement process in Trump’s lawsuit against CBS over editing of a Kamala Harris interview. Ellison said he had heard it would take $49.5 million to settle, according to people close to the situation. Byrne said Ellison was merely venting and that settlement negotiations were well-known to the company. Paramount settled for $16 million in July 2025, and the merger was approved soon after.
This month, the Justice Department cleared Paramount Skydance’s $81 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, closing an investigation despite concerns from some antitrust staff. David Ellison addressed staff questions in a two-hour interview. Desai maintained that Trump was “neutral to all parties throughout the Warner Bros. Discovery bidding process.” A Paramount spokeswoman said no commitments were made regarding the future of CNN or any other news property “other than the goal to deliver truth-based journalism.”
Larry Ellison, who now lives about a 20-minute drive from Mar-a-Lago in an oceanfront estate in Manalapan, Florida, maintains a close relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom Trump also has a longstanding rapport. Steve Witkoff, the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, helped forge Ellison’s ties to Trump, according to a person familiar with the relationship. Ellison’s son, David, bought the news and opinion startup Free Press in 2025 and installed its co-founder Bari Weiss atop CBS News, where she has made significant changes to staffing and programming. A merger with Warner would add CNN to the Ellison fold.