Oracle founder Larry Ellison keeps piling up wins. After briefly overtaking Tesla’s Elon Musk as the world’s richest person this month, the 81-year-old tech billionaire secured a spot among the U.S.-backed buyer group poised to take over TikTok.
This announcement comes on the heels of the Ellison’s son, David, overseeing a successful August merger between his Skydance Media production company and Paramount Global, which also owns CBS, and which the elder Ellison has a financial stake. The younger Ellison is also said to be working on a bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of CNN and HBO.
Antitrust concerns aside, the politics of the Ellison family’s rather sudden rise as media and entertainment moguls has been cause for concern for the left. By the end of next year, 170 million Americans who use Tiktok, as well as the audiences of CBS News and CNN could conceivably fall under the influence of Larry Ellison, a longtime Republican donor who boasts a cozy relationship with Donald Trump.
Following a disastrous 2024 election for Democrats that saw Trump capture every swing state, the White House has interpreted those results as a conservative mandate to overhaul the American cultural landscape that, they would argue, has long been controlled by progressives. The administration has begun this process by targeting the big broadcast networks, which require licenses from the federal government to broadcast over the air. The parent companies of ABC and CBS have each settled separate defamation lawsuits with Trump and pulled their respective liberal late-night hosts Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert off the air. (CBS said its decision to cancel Colbert’s show was financial and not political.)
Axios has cited these events as evidence of the “Media’s MAGA makeover,” with the Ellison family’s media ventures as a continuation of the trend. Both Ellisons were contacted through their respective companies for comment.
Any owner has the potential to shift the ideology of their media property, as Elon Musk showed by purchasing Twitter and molding it into the preeminent social platform for conservative voices. Rupert Murdoch showed in building his own conservative behemoth at Fox that ideology and profits are not mutually exclusive.
“The assumption when most people make an investment is that they’re making that investment in order to make money,” Neil Malhotra, a political economy professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business told me. “One of the jokes people say is Twitter, X, is the most socially responsible company in America, and why do people say that? It’s because Elon has done a lot of stuff that has hurt the financial standing of Twitter for these other values that he cares about.”
Malhotra was part of a research team that published the 2017 study: Predispositions and the Political Behavior of American Economic Elites: Evidence from Technology Entrepreneurs. Through this work, he identified that most Silicon Valley investors back liberal, redistributive social policies but conservative, hands-off regulatory policies. Ellison has always stood out among them for his conservatism, but he was more a classic Bush-era Republican than a member of the MAGA faithful, Malhotra said. Bush notably supported immigration reform and globalist trade as a means of expanding America’s economy.
While Ellison’s flamboyant lifestyle has garnered media attention — he owns Hawaii’s sixth-largest island and has had six wives — the Oracle founder, worth more than $360 billion, has not sought the kind of political megaphone a man of his wealth could attain and utilize. His public statements are often tech-focused. And far from being an outspoken advocate of Trump, Ellison quietly moved to spend millions on South Carolina Senator Tim Scott’s 2024 Republican primary bid before that campaign fizzled out, CNBC reported. He previously supported now Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s 2016 bid for president. In 2020, he hosted a fundraising event for Trump, but the New York Times reported he never showed up.
According to FEC filings, Ellison’s recent donations have largely gone to Republicans and conservative causes, but in 2016 he donated to Democratic Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, and in prior years he gave to others on the left. One of those individuals was President Bill Clinton, whose campaign Ellison backed financially in the 1990s. In a 2018 interview with Fox Business, Ellison said: “Bill Clinton was a centrist. Tony Blair was a centrist. Marco Rubio is a centrist. Mitt Romney is a centrist. Those are my politics.”
It’s true Ellison has visited Trump’s White House, and the Washington Post reported he joined a November 2020 call to discuss contesting the results of that election.
Malhotra notes that the disposition of America’s tech titans toward the Democratic Party became far more acrimonious in wake of President Joe Biden’s ascent to the White House. President Barack Obama had a cozy relationship with the industry, taking limited regulatory action while his staff exited the White House to take jobs in Silicon Valley. In contrast, Biden appointed Lina Khan as his Federal Trade Commission chair, whose reputation was built on arguments in favor of antitrust enforcement targeting Big Tech. Meanwhile, Biden styled himself “the most pro-union president in history.” Malhotra’s study found tech leaders disproportionally oppose union power.
If Ellison’s post-Obama shift to the right is rooted more deeply in financial considerations rather than any political ideology, he would be discarding that philosophy by turning the media properties he and his son control into a MAGA megaphone. Trump’s approval rating sits at just 39 percent. The economics of media generally dictate that a larger audience exceeds a smaller one, though even that is changing in today’s fractured media environment. Furthermore, globalism and immigration are generally seen as benefitting the tech industry, which has always said it needs to import skilled workers from overseas. Ellison’s friend Musk and Ohio GOP gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy broke from the MAGA base this year by favoring an expansion of H-1B visas, which the White House is now cracking down on.
Separately, it’s notable that Paramount and Warner Bros. fall under the ownership of David Ellison, who is not an ideological clone of his dad. While he has appointed Keneth R. Weinstein of the right-leaning Hudson Institute as CBS ombudsman and is said to eyeing a purchase of the center-right Free Press news outlet, the younger Ellison has made 56 donations since 2024 — all of which have gone to Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris, according to Open Secrets.