Larry Ellison didn’t join the gaggle of CEOs that traveled with President Trump on his state visit to China. He wasn’t among the guests at a White House dinner Trump hosted with tech titans. He also skipped the UFC event on Trump’s 80th birthday.
The Oracle billionaire didn’t need to be at these public events. Ellison, 81, has developed a more-private friendship with Trump that has helped his tech company’s business as well as his son’s effort to assemble a media conglomerate. Key to the relationship: Ellison’s money.
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 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.
Trump’s investment accounts were actively trading Oracle shares earlier this year, including a sale worth at least $1 million in January and a purchase worth at least $1 million in March, federal disclosure filings show. In a statement, the Trump Organization has said that the president’s investments are independently managed and that he isn’t involved in selecting or approving investments.
Trump is “committed to working with every American business and business leader,” said White House spokesman Kush Desai. Oracle declined to comment.
While Larry Ellison wasn’t at the Ultimate Fighting Championship event at the White House this month, his son, David Ellison, was among the VIPs there. It took place days after a decision by the Justice Department to clear the $81 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery by his company, Paramount Skydance. The spectacle was streamed by Paramount, which under David Ellison’s leadership paid billions for the rights to UFC events.
The Ellisons have cultivated a symbiotic friendship with Trump. Larry Ellison and the president share ideological beliefs in support of Israel and critical of some mainstream media. David Ellison bought the Free Press in 2025 and installed the news and opinion startup’s 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.
The president has publicly praised David Ellison. “You’re going to be a great success,” Trump recently said on stage when he saw the scion in a Miami crowd. “You’re going to blow away your father, and he’ll be very happy about that because he loves you.”
Trump added: “Say hello to him. OK?”
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.
The Ellisons haven’t always supported Trump. Larry Ellison backed other Republican candidates for president in 2016 and 2024. That included support for Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina—whom he wanted as Trump’s selection as the vice presidential candidate in the recent presidential race. David Ellison donated nearly $1 million in 2024 to a Democratic super PAC supporting the Biden-Harris campaign, federal records show.
Much of Larry Ellison’s political giving flows through political nonprofit groups that don’t require disclosure, according to people familiar with his donations. Federal Election Commission filings don’t show any funds Larry Ellison has given directly to the recent Trump campaign or related political-action committees.
While Trump and Larry Ellison often communicate by phone, Ellison has shifted his home base to Florida and is known to visit Mar-a-Lago. His official residence is now an oceanfront estate in Manalapan, Fla., which he bought for $173 million in 2022. It is about a 20-minute drive from Trump’s club.
Larry Ellison is close with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom Trump has had a longstanding rapport. Steve Witkoff, U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, helped forge Ellison’s close ties to Trump, according to a person familiar with the relationship.
Larry Ellison and Trump became better acquainted about 10 years ago, connected through Ellison’s longtime No. 2, Safra Catz. Though Ellison and Catz initially supported the 2016 presidential run of then-Sen. Marco Rubio, they shifted to Trump when he became the Republican nominee. Catz was a member of Trump’s presidential transition team in late 2016 and was an adviser during his first term.
By February 2020, Ellison was becoming involved with Trump’s re-election efforts. He hosted a fundraiser for Trump at his private estate in Rancho Mirage, Calif., though he didn’t personally attend. He later said he supported the president and wanted him to succeed.
Ellison continued to stand by Trump, including after he lost the 2020 presidential election. Less than two weeks later, Ellison was among a small group of Trump allies on a call to discuss strategies to contest the election results in certain key states, according to emails cited in court records.
Some of the people on the call, which included Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, the longtime Trump legal adviser Jay Sekulow and the Fox News host Sean Hannity, discussed claims of widespread voter fraud, according to one of the emails. One goal was to find a legal pathway to invalidate or recount ballots in swing states, including Pennsylvania and Georgia.
Ellison largely remained out of politics during the Biden administration. Ahead of the 2024 election, however, Ellison discussed bankrolling Scott, the South Carolina senator, in the presidential primary, according to people familiar with the conversations. Scott and Ellison had been close for years; Scott and his family made a couple of trips to Ellison’s estate on the Hawaiian island of Lanai.
By the summer of 2024, Ellison strongly encouraged Trump to pick Scott as his running mate, suggesting that his financial support would hinge on that choice, according to people familiar with Ellison’s giving. Trump instead picked JD Vance as his running mate.
Ellison soon recalibrated. Weeks later, when it was clear Trump had momentum, Ellison made a roughly $45 million donation to a political nonprofit supporting Trump’s candidacy, making it one of the largest single injections of capital in the cycle, the people said.
Trump was inaugurated for his second term on Jan. 20, 2025. A day later, Ellison arrived at the White House for the unveiling of the Stargate project, a $500 billion, privately funded initiative anchored by Oracle’s cloud infrastructure.
There was just one issue: Ellison didn’t have his passport or a government-issued ID with him. White House protocol requires all visitors, regardless of status, to present government ID to the Secret Service for entry.
When the issue reached the president, Trump personally intervened to get Ellison through, telling security “everyone knows who Larry is.” Ellison was ultimately escorted into the Roosevelt Room.
David Ellison, whose company Skydance was in the midst of merging with CBS’s owner, Paramount, met with Trump at a UFC event in April 2025. The two were photographed ringside, along with Elon Musk.
Behind the scenes, the younger Ellison was growing frustrated as he awaited regulatory approval for the merger, and Paramount negotiated a high-stakes settlement with Trump. The president had filed a lawsuit against Paramount’s CBS for its news division’s allegedly deceptive editing of an interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
Around that time, David Ellison called Barbara Byrne, a Paramount director, expressing his frustration because he was eager for the merger to close and said he had heard that it would take $49.5 million to settle, people close to the situation said. Byrne told Ellison they shouldn’t be talking and informed Paramount’s counsel and the board, the people said.
“David called to vent about how protracted the settlement process had become—there was no intent to transmit information, intervene, or collude in the settlement,” Byrne said in a statement. “In fact, the settlement negotiations were well-known to us, as the company was negotiating via outside legal counsel with the plaintiff’s counsel through a mediator.”
In July 2025, Paramount settled for $16 million. The merger was approved by regulators soon after.
By late 2025, with Paramount under its control, the Ellison family turned its attention to Warner Bros. Discovery. Netflix reached an agreement to acquire the storied Hollywood studio in December. Soon after, Larry Ellison called Trump, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Paramount made a competing offer, and the pursuit dragged on for months. At one point, Larry Ellison told Trump that if Paramount landed the Warner deal, it could overhaul CNN. Both men aren’t fans of the cable news channel, believing it is biased toward liberal news and against the administration, according to people familiar with the matter.
“President Trump has consistently maintained that he was neutral to all parties throughout the Warner Bros. Discovery bidding process,” Desai, the White House spokesman, said.
A spokeswoman for Paramount said, “No commitments from either David or Larry Ellison have been made to any government body, State AG or federal agency regarding the future of CNN or any other news property, other than the goal to deliver truth-based journalism.”
After Netflix dropped out, Paramount secured a deal for Warner Bros. Discovery. The Justice Department blessed the merger this month, closing an investigation despite the concerns of some Justice Department antitrust staffers. Senior leaders believed that David Ellison persuasively addressed many of the staff’s questions during a two-hour interview, the Journal reported.
Write to Emily Glazer at Emily.Glazer@wsj.com, Annie Linskey at annie.linskey@wsj.com and Jessica Toonkel at jessica.toonkel@wsj.com
