Name: Larry Ellison
Title: Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Oracle
Industry Affiliation
- Oracle emerged as one of three major investors of TikTok after the app’s forced sale by the US government. Oracle now owns a 15% stake in the American version of the company, holds a seat on its board, and will directly oversee the platform’s algorithm and data management.
- Ellison has publicly voiced support for the consolidation of government data into a single repository for AI analysis, and offered Oracle as the “technological backbone” of an AI-powered mass surveillance system.
Trump Admin Ties
- Ellison is a longtime Republican donor and Trump supporter. Ellison hosted a 2020 campaign fundraiser for Trump, and following Trump’s 2020 election defeat, joined a call with Republican politicians and activists to discuss ways to challenge and overturn the presidential election results.
- Trump appointed Ellison as one of the 13 members on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). The council is nominally meant to advise and provide recommendations to the President on matters of science and technology, but its tech-industry heavy membership means it will likely operate as a means of personally lobbying Trump on tech and AI regulation.
- Early into his second term, Trump announced Stargate, a joint venture between Ellison’s Oracle, OpenAI, and Softbank to invest $500 billion in US artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Government Affairs
- Oracle has spent over $11 million each year since 2021 lobbying the federal government, and has spent over $2.7 million in the first quarter of 2026.
- Oracle has lobbied Congress, the White House, and numerous federal agencies on issues related to artificial intelligence, data centers, cloud computing, and a host of non-tech related issues.
- Oracle has employed several former members of Congress as lobbyists: Senator Don Nickels (R-OK) and Representatives Bob Livingston (R-LA), Cheri Bustos (D-IL), and Jeff Miller (R-FL). Miller, in particular, may have been especially influential in securing Oracle’s ownership shares in TikTok, at the time representing both Oracle and TikTok’s parent company ByteDance.
State Level Action
- Oracle is a member of the Data Center Coalition (DCC), a trade association advancing the interests of the “data center community”. The DCC has represented its members’ interests in California, Georgia, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.
- The DCC created the non-profit Virginia Connects and funnelled $700,000 through the organization to create ads and messaging praising the supposed benefits of data centers while the Virginia legislature considered legislation that could have strengthened data center regulations. The DCC donated $165,000 in 2024 to Virginia state lawmakers to oppose legislation to regulate data centers.
- Opposed Georgia legislation that would have halted state tax incentives for data centers and lobbied Governor Brian Kemp to veto it.
- DCC president Josh Levi wrote a letter to the Ohio Power Sitting Board asking to reject a proposal that would “add regulatory uncertainty” and “delay project approvals and unduly drive-up costs.”
PHOTO: Larry Ellison at Oracle OpenWorld by Ilan Costica is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International, 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.