While many of Big Tech’s biggest names have been fairly public and open about their dealings with President Donald Trump, there’s one executive who has been more stealth in his dealings with the CEO-in-Chief.
Larry Ellison, the billionaire Oracle cofounder, gave about $45 million to a nonprofit backing Trump’s 2024 campaign, people familiar with the fundraising told The Wall Street Journal. This funding wasn’t subject to disclosure rules, according to WSJ, and hadn’t been reported until this week.
This quiet donation runs counter to the donations and support from other billionaires for either Trump’s campaign or his ongoing efforts in his second term. Many CEOs, including Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook, Boeing’s Kelly Ortberg, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, joined Trump on his recent trip to China. Trump also hosted a White House dinner in September with 33 Silicon Valley power players and invited executives like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian to his recent 80th birthday celebration, which included a UFC event.
Ellison was absent for all of those.
Instead, the Oracle cofounder and the world’s sixth-richest man has continued to give millions more to groups supporting Trump since the election, according to the WSJ report, and Oracle is one of the corporate sponsors for Freedom 250. Federal disclosure documents from the U.S. Office of Government Ethics also show Trump’s investment accounts actively trading Oracle shares earlier this year.
Ellison’s quieter approach has coincided with some major wins for Oracle. The day after Trump’s second inauguration, Oracle was named one of the anchors of Stargate, a $500 billion plan to build AI data centers across the U.S. Trump unveiled it at the White House on Jan. 21, 2025, with Ellison standing alongside him, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son.
Later in 2025, Oracle joined a group that took over TikTok’s U.S. operations after Trump signed an executive order clearing the deal. The president said in September 2025, Oracle and Ellison would “play a very big role in terms of security, safety, and everything else” for the app. That same month, Oracle reported $455 billion in remaining performance obligations, up 359% year over year.
The payoff has appeared to extend to Ellison’s family. Larry’s son David, 43, has built a media empire over the same stretch. The Trump administration cleared the merger of his company, Skydance, with Paramount last year. The deal closed soon after Paramount settled Trump’s lawsuit against CBS for $16 million. This month, the Justice Department cleared Paramount Skydance’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, with no divestitures required, despite concerns from some antitrust staffers. The deal would hand the family CNN, a network neither Ellison nor the family likes. The elder Ellison once told Trump that if Paramount won, it could overhaul the channel, people familiar with the matter told the WSJ. But the deal isn’t final. California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the deal “is not a done deal” and is still under investigation by his office.
The White House told Fortune that Trump isn’t really playing favorites, though.
“President Trump is committed to working with every American business and business leader to cement America’s innovative dominance, reshore critical manufacturing, and accelerate economic growth for everyday American workers,” White House spokesman Kush Desai told Fortune in a statement. “Industry leaders in sectors ranging from autos to pharmaceuticals to technology have committed to investing trillions in the United States because they know they have a friend and ally in the White House.”
Oracle didn’t immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
To be sure, Ellison hasn’t always backed Trump. In the 2024 race, he supported Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina and pushed Trump to pick Scott as his running mate. Trump chose JD Vance instead.
