He is behind a mega deal A billionaire reaches for power in Trump's shadow
TikTok is to become US-American. Behind Trump's deal is a man that hardly anyone knows: Larry Ellison. He operates in the background, but his influence extends into the White House - and far beyond.
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- US President Donald Trump is facilitating the takeover of TikTok by US investors, in which Oracle founder Larry Ellison could play a key role.
- Larry Ellison is one of the richest men in the world. He has been building up political influence for years, particularly around Trump.
- Ellison's growing power is also reflected in his involvement in media, technology and politics - the media have already dubbed him the "shadow president of the USA".
For many, the world briefly stood still when TikTok went offline for a few hours in the US in January. The Chinese parent company ByteDance had previously refused to sell TikTok, as requested due to security concerns. However, US President Donald Trump extended the deadline for such a deal shortly after the deactivation - and TikTok was back online.
At the end of September, Trump signed an executive order to facilitate the deal. ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, will continue to hold 20 percent of TikTok, while US investors will receive 80 percent. Officially, it is still unclear who exactly is involved in the deal. However, when signing the agreement, Trump said that Oracle and its co-founder Larry Ellison will play a "big" role.
Larry Ellison is the second richest man in the world, but unlike Elon Musk , who is ahead of him in the rankings, he often keeps a low profile. However, the influence of the unassuming Ellison extends both to the White House and Hollywood.
The 81-year-old is co-founder of Oracle, a company for database systems and business applications. He owns 41 percent of the company. He was CEO until 2014 and is now Chief Technology Officer and Chairman of the Board of Directors.
Ellison was born in New York in 1944. After just a few months, his single mother gave him to her aunt and her husband in Chicago, who adopted him. In his youth, he dropped out of university twice and then learned programming on his own. He moved to California and worked as a programmer, founding Oracle in 1977. 16 years later, he was a billionaire.
However, it was the AI boom that catapulted him to almost absurd wealth. Oracle signed billion-dollar contracts with OpenAI, Meta and Nvidia. In 2020, Forbes estimated his fortune at around 59 billion dollars - today, according to the business magazine, it is 347 billion dollars.
As a billionaire, Ellison discovered power
He has always used his money to support politicians: in 2002 he backed Democrat Bill Clinton, then switched sides in the 2016 presidential election campaign and supported Marco Rubio, a Republican and direct opponent of Trump. He has backed Trump since 2020. He organized a fundraising evening for his second presidential candidacy, but did not appear there himself.
Ellison is also considered a prominent pro-Israeli voice - he has a close relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom he has been friends for years. According to the Guardian, Ellison donated 16.6 million dollars to the organization "Friends of the Israel Defense Forces" in 2017, which funds programs to support Israeli soldiers.
Shortly after Trump's second inauguration, Ellison also made a public appearance with Trump. In January 2025, together with other tech CEOs, they announced the founding of the company Stargate, which aims to expand the infrastructure for artificial intelligence in the United States. "In Larry's case, it goes way beyond technology - he's kind of the CEO of everything," Trump said about Ellison at the event , according to CNN.
And indeed, Ellison's influence goes far beyond politics. In 2012, he bought the Hawaiian island of Lanai for almost 300 million dollars. He also owns a tennis tournament and a sailing team, with which he won the America's Cup in 2010 and 2013. In 2022, he invested one billion dollars in Elon Musk's Twitter takeover. Simply because "it would be fun", as the New York Times writes.
Ellison also owns 50 percent of the production company Skydance, which his son David Ellison founded and runs. In August 2025, Skydance merged with Paramount and thus also took over the CBS television station. Next, the Ellisons want to use Skydance to take over the Warner Bros. group.
A few days ago, Skydance announced the appointment of conservative journalist Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS. Bari Weiss resigned from the New York Times in the summer of 2020 because she found its reporting too left-wing - and since then has almost symbolized the rightward slide of the US media.
"Shadow president of the USA"
And now TikTok. The takeover of the app by Ellison's company Oracle is actually just the next logical step. Oracle has been hosting the app's US data on its cloud servers since 2020. But quietly, in the background. Now, however, the shadow project is becoming a symbol of the ever-closer alliance between Trump and the tech industry.
A rapprochement at the center of which is Larry Ellison - the man about whom a biography was published in 1997 with the title: "The difference between God and Larry Ellison? God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison." And whom the magazine "Wired" described as the "Shadow President of the USA" in September 2025.
"If I could make it 100 percent MAGA, I would," Trump said when signing the executive order on TikTok. He added: "But unfortunately, it's not going to work out that way." With Larry Ellison at his side, however, he could come closer to this goal than ever before.
