The billionaire has gotten media dominance and cozy government deals for what amounts to chicken feed.
Larry Ellison and Donald Trump ar the White House on January 21, 2025.(Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)
For most people, $45 million is a staggering sum of wealth, enough to satisfy all the dreams of avarice and more. But for tech plutocrat Larry Ellison, $45 million is just a drop in a bucket. According to Bloomberg, Ellison is the sixth-richest person in the world, with a net worth of $202 billion. To put that in perspective, for someone with $200 billion, spending $45 million is the equivalent of a person with a net worth of $200,000 spending $45. In other words, it’s chicken feed rather than real money. And it was all Ellison needed to get in Donald Trump’s good graces.
Ellison and Trump clearly have established a cozy alliance of mutual back-scratching, facilitated by the fact that Ellison owns a lavish $173 million estate in Manalapan, Florida, a brisk 20-minute drive from the president’s favorite haunt, Mar-a-Lago. On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported on the “symbiotic relationship” between the billionaire and the president. According to the newspaper:
Ellison gave roughly $45 million to a political nonprofit group supporting Trump’s election efforts in 2024, according to people familiar with the fundraising. Such funding isn’t subject to disclosure rules and hasn’t been previously reported.
More recently, Ellison has given millions of dollars more to groups that support Trump since the election, the people said, with some of the funds going to Trump’s legacy initiatives in Washington, D.C. Oracle is among the corporate sponsors listed by Freedom 250, a Trump-aligned group hosting celebrations for the country’s 250th birthday.
Prior to the 2024 election, Ellison had an ambiguous relationship with Trump. He didn’t initially support the president in either of his election campaigns, preferring Marco Rubio in 2016 and Tim Scott in 2024 (he also unsuccessfully pushed for Scott to be Trump’s vice-presidential nominee). But Ellison did rally behind Trump when he was trying to steal the 2020 election, participating in November 2020 phone calls with senior supporters of the president to strategize about how to invalidate election results in Pennsylvania and Georgia. And he has made sure to keep the money pipeline flowing to Trump.
Ellison’s donations to the president are significant because his family owns companies with extensive business and legal issues before the government. By all accounts, he is getting his money’s worth. According to the Wall Street Journal report, Trump’s investment accounts have twice this year traded in stock from Ellison’s firm, Oracle, to the tune of $2 million. Meanwhile, Oracle’s contracts with the government continue to balloon:
The Ellisons have parlayed this proximity into a dominant position in the American tech and media landscape. The day after Trump’s second inauguration, Larry Ellison was in the West Wing when Oracle was selected as the architectural backbone for the administration’s $500 billion plan to build artificial-intelligence data centers in the U.S. Later in 2025, Oracle was part of an investor group that gained control of TikTok’s U.S. operations in a deal brokered by the U.S. government.
Under Trump, Ellison and his son David have also launched the most significant media mergers in a generation, first merging their firm Skydance with Paramount (which owns CBS) and then muscling Netflix aside to seal a takeover of Warner Bros Discovery. After taking over Paramount, the Ellisons elevated Bari Weiss as ideological commissar to make CBS friendlier to Donald Trump, a move clearly aimed at making the president and the Justice Department more receptive to allowing Paramount Skydance to fuse with Warner Bros Discovery.
The Wall Street Journal story adds a significant detail illuminating the backdoor dealmaking behind the expanding Ellison empire. When CBS was still fighting a frivolous lawsuit Trump had launched against the network for a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, David Ellison made a phone call to Paramount executive Barbara Byrne, relaying what he heard was a reasonable sum to settle the affair. According to the newspaper, “Byrne told Ellison they shouldn’t be talking and informed Paramount’s counsel and the board.” But CBS did make a settlement, which led to the greenlighting of the merger by the Department of Justice.
Both the Ellison family and the Trump White House deny any improper action or collusion.
The Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery deal would also place CNN under the control of the Ellison family. According to The New York Times, many at the cable news network fear that the Ellisons will deploy Bari Weiss to compromise their newsroom, as she has done at CBS:
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Ms. Weiss, who had virtually no broadcasting experience before taking over in October, has reshaped CBS News in occasionally chaotic ways, recently firing the leadership of the network’s flagship, “60 Minutes.” Several on-air correspondents who were fired later accused her of editorial interference, which she has denied.
Anderson Cooper, one of CNN’s most famous on-air personalities, quit 60 Minutes (where he long held a post) and is reportedly hostile to Weiss having a role at CNN.
The turmoil at CBS and CNN is a byproduct of the real story: the economic inequality that has given billionaires such as Larry Ellison enormous power, allowing them to both purchase the political system and consolidate their grip over the country’s wealth.
Yet, while Ellison might own the Trump White House, his power isn’t absolute, nor is the merger of Paramount with Warner Bros Discovery a done deal.
As constitutional lawyer and Nation columnist Zephyr Teachout noted recently, state Attorneys Generals can also bring antitrust law to bear. Speaking on MS NOW on Sunday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta indicated he was thinking along the lines mapped out by Teachout. According to Bonta, “We are investigating. The transaction has not cleared regulatory scrutiny. There are red flags in the air everywhere.”
Bonta’s words are heartening, but state-level litigation is only one avenue to pursue. The story of Ellison’s relationship with Trump is a flagrant example of how corrupt the political system has become. Ellison is shamelessly buying the government, acting with bravado because he senses that there is no opposition to his dealings. Democrats need to fight to create a different incentive structure. They could subject the Ellison family and the Trump administration to congressional investigations after the midterms and also campaign on enforcing anti-trust laws when they regain the White House.
The corruption of Ellison and Trump cuts to a core issue of democracy. For Ellison, $45 million is peanuts. He shouldn’t be allowed to run roughshod over antitrust law just because he has so much money that he can buy the White House with his spare change.
Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.