Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison and U.S. President Donald Trump share a laugh as Ellison in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on January 21, 2025 in Washington, DC, where they announced the Stargate AI infrastructure project.
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Larry Ellison is no longer an ocean away from Donald Trump.
The 81-year-old Oracle cofounder—worth $194 billion and ranked the world’s sixth richest person—has moved his primary residence to Manalapan, Florida, roughly a 20-minute drive from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, according to previously unreported county records.
It wasn’t so long ago that Ellison said he had relocated to Lanai, the Hawaii island he bought for $300 million in 2012 (it’s now assessed at $1.2 billion). In a later 2020 email to Oracle employees, he wrote that he’d moved there full time.
That didn’t last. Now he’s in Palm Beach County.
Ellison, now Oracle’s chief technology officer and Paramount’s controlling shareholder, has a history of buying land in bulk. His $2.9 billion real estate portfolio includes at least four homes in Woodside, California; five adjacent parcels in Redwood City; four in Newport, Rhode Island; and roughly a dozen properties on Malibu’s Carbon Beach, two of which appear to have burned down in last year’s fires. On Lanai, he bought pretty much everything.
Florida seems different and certainly more strategic against the backdrop of Ellison’s evolving relationship with the president. In 2020, he let Trump use his 250-acre Rancho Mirage estate for a fundraiser (to the ire of some Oracle employees). “We only have one president at a time,” he told Forbes in 2020. “I don’t think he’s the devil—I support him and want him to do well.”
The following year, Ellison purchased his first property in Trump’s orbit, a sprawling North Palm Beach mansion with 200 feet of beach access, for $80 million. A year later he set a Florida record, spending $173 million on a 16-acre, 60,000-square-foot compound in the 400-person barrier island town of Manalapan.
The nine-mile drive from President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago (green) to Ellison’s new permanent residence (red).
OpenStreetMap
That estate is now his declared primary residence. In April 2023, Ellison moved his voter registration to Florida, listing no party affiliation. A month later, he filed a declaration of domicile to move his primary residence from Lanai City to the Manalapan mansion. The move was not without financial consequences—good ones. By relocating before selling large blocks of Oracle stock and collecting dividends, Ellison saved an estimated $1 billion in Hawaii state taxes.
Have a tip about Larry Ellison’s, or another tech billionaire’s, relationship with President Trump? Contact Phoebe Liu at pliu@forbes.com and phoebe.789 on Signal.
Since 2023, Ellison has expanded his footprint in Palm Beach County. In 2024, he spent $277 million on the Eau Palm Beach Resort & Spa, adding to his $1 billion portfolio of luxury real estate. Last November, he purchased Palm Beach County’s 600-acre Lion County Safari, first reported by The Real Deal. Between 2023 and mid-2025, entities tied to Ellison’s main business mailing address quietly bought up nine nearly-adjacent residential homes in Palm Beach County’s Boynton Beach neighborhood for around $1 million each. It’s unclear what he plans to do with these purchases, which have not previously been reported.
Ellison’s jet travel indicates that he does indeed spend most of his time in Palm Beach County. Of 71 trackable flights in 2025, 50 of them started or ended in Florida. None originated in Hawaii; the last trackable flight from Lanai was in late 2023.
Ellison has been renovating his Florida home since 2022, according to Palm Beach County records: replacing the buildings’ columns with steel, adding new accessory buildings, replacing the property’s dock and boat lift and per an October document, even initiating a contract with golf course builder Integrity Golf.
While Ellison has never donated directly to Trump’s campaign, their interests increasingly intersect. Ellison appeared last year at the White House to help Trump announce his $500 billion Stargate AI infrastructure initiative. Ellison and Trump helped broker a deal that gave Oracle a 15% stake in TikTok’s U.S. entity. Ellison and his son David—now Paramount’s controlling shareholders—have been reshaping its CBS network in a Trump-friendly way. (David, once a Democratic donor, was Senator Lindsey Graham’s guest to Trump’s State of the Union address on Wednesday.) Meanwhile, the father-son duo is bidding—with the elder Ellison’s $40 billion personal guarantee—pursuing a hostile takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery and thus CNN.
Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate lies at the water’s edge in Palm Beach, Florida.
Steve Starr/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images
Policy alignment matters. And Oracle, which spent $11.5 million on lobbying last year, stands to benefit from friendlier AI data center rules, export control decisions and federal AI strategy. The Federal Communications Commission, where Trump is becoming increasingly heavy-handed, didn’t approve the Ellisons’ Paramount takeover until the parties decided on some key pro-Trump concessions. Paramount is reportedly using the Ellison family’s Trump ties to woo regulators; Trump hasn’t commented on the deal, but his administration is helping—via a DOJ probe earlier this month into Netflix’s already-accepted bid for Warner Bros. and a letter on Wednesday from 11 red state attorneys general against the Netflix deal. Such public action rarely happens without negotiations in private. Mar-a-Lago, where Trump spends much of his time, is where a lot of those conversations happen.
Giacomo Tognini contributed reporting.
