Washington (AFP) – US tech titans Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos are taking a prominent place in the new Trump era, but another player from a different era—Oracle boss Larry Ellison—is making a surprise return. In the first 48 hours of Trump’s second term, the 80-year-old Silicon Valley veteran has become central to two pressing issues: the fate of TikTok and the growing infrastructure demands of artificial intelligence.
Though Ellison’s prominence peaked in the 1990s, before the internet age, when he made headlines as a sports-loving maverick with a passion for tennis, sailing, and public spats with Bill Gates, his influence persists. Unlike most tech leaders who distanced themselves from Trump in 2016, Ellison offered his early support. Today, he ranks among the world’s wealthiest individuals, with a fortune of $230 billion, trailing only Musk and Bezos but ahead of Zuckerberg.
On Tuesday, Trump’s first full day in office, Ellison made an unexpected White House appearance to unveil an AI infrastructure project alongside OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son. “He’s sort of CEO of everything. He’s an amazing man,” Trump enthused while introducing his longtime ally. “The data center we already built, it was the largest computer ever built. The data center we’re building will surpass it,” Ellison said after the meeting.
Ellison’s relationship with the Trump administration dates back to the first term when he played a pivotal role in negotiations over stripping TikTok from its Chinese ownership. In the process, Oracle became a trusted provider of the company’s data storage in the United States. Oracle maintains that role to this day and is key to keeping TikTok available to US users, at the request of Trump and in defiance of a US law that could see Ellison’s company fined $5,000 per user. The company is frequently mentioned as a potential buyer of TikTok’s US operations, which were given 75 days on Monday to find non-Chinese ownership or face a permanent ban. Oracle’s share price was up more than seven percent after the AI announcement.
Ellison built his fortune through Oracle, which he founded in 1977 as a data server provider for the CIA among others. Early on, the company competed with Microsoft, IBM, and Sun Microsystems to provide the data infrastructure for the emerging digital economy. Under Ellison’s leadership, Oracle became known for its aggressive corporate culture and ambitious acquisition strategy, spending billions to become the world’s largest database management company. While Oracle’s market value remains smaller than tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon, the company has seen renewed growth amid the AI boom and increasing demand for data server capacity.
At the height of his career, Ellison was the brash and hard-knuckle counterpoint to Bill Gates. He made headlines picking fights with some of the biggest names in technology—Gates, Google’s Eric Schmidt—and became comrades in arms with others, most famously Steve Jobs during the period when the Apple founder was still exiled from the company he created. While Gates attended elite private schools and Harvard with family support, Ellison grew up on Chicago’s South Side, raised by his great-aunt and heavy-drinking uncle after his teenage mother gave him up at birth in 1944.
Known for his athletic build and perpetual tan, Ellison invested heavily in professional sailing, with his Oracle team winning the America’s Cup in both 2010 and 2013. In recent years, he has formed close ties with Musk, investing $1 billion in Twitter’s acquisition and serving on Tesla’s board as a major shareholder. His extensive real estate portfolio includes a $300 million Hawaiian island, which he envisions as an exclusive eco-resort for the ultra-wealthy and where Musk is a visitor.
© 2024 AFP
