Larry Ellison quietly gave $45 million to a pro-Trump group—then Oracle landed a starring role in a $500 billion AI buildout

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 or