Part-Time Newport Billionaire Joined Call Contesting Trump’s Loss in November 2020
Sunday, May 22, 2022
Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder and chairman of the software company Oracle who has spent reportedly more than $100 million rehabbing one of the biggest mansions in Newport, Rhode Island, made national headlines this week -- not for business, but for politics.
Ellison is tied to a phone with Fox News host Sean Hannity, U.S. Lindsey Graham, and others “focused on strategies for contesting the legitimacy of the vote, according to court documents and a participant" — first reported by the Washington Post.
As GoLocal has reported, Ellison has bought up some of the most prominent mansions in Newport and invested more than $100 million into the properties.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST“The Nov. 14 call included Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.); Fox News host Sean Hannity; Jay Sekulow, an attorney for President Donald Trump; and James Bopp Jr., an attorney for True the Vote, a Texas-based nonprofit that has promoted disputed claims of widespread voter fraud,” reports the Post.
“Ellison’s participation illustrates a previously unknown dimension in the multifaceted campaign to challenge Trump’s loss, an effort still coming into focus more than 18 months later. It is the first known example of a technology industry titan joining powerful figures in conservative politics, media and law to strategize about Trump’s post-loss options and confer with an activist group that had already filed four lawsuits seeking to uncover evidence of illegal voting,” according to the Post.
Newport Mega-Mansion
As GoLocal’s architecture critic Will Morgan wrote in March of 2021 in a column, "Newport’s $100 Million Fixer Upper:"
Two years ago, Ellison paid $11 million for Seacliff, a ten-room brick house, in a vaguely Norman-Georgian country style. While not one of the more significant Newport houses, it has a stunning Atlantic Ocean view. It also has a starkly modern guesthouse built right into the rocks below Cliff Walk. While it is not known what plans the new owner has for Seacliff, it abuts and thus enlarges Beechwood, the former Astor mansion that is the centerpiece of Ellison's Newport fiefdom. The Beechwood land now spreads from Rosecliff to Marble House.
Since buying Beechwood in 2010 for $10.5 million, Ellison has spent over ten times that amount restoring the main house, an adjacent carriage, and creating a new Bellevue Avenue gatehouse in the style of the main house. Under the direction of John Grosvenor of Newport Collaborative Architects, the goal is that Beechwood will look as it did in 1881. At that time the thirty-year-old house was restored and enlarged by the Richard Morris Hunt. He was society grande dame Caroline Schermerhorn Astor's favorite architect, as well as the designer of other Newport mansions, including the Breakers and Belcourt.
The main house is slated to become the Beechwood Art Museum, which is to house Ellison's collection of 18th and 19th-century European art. Despite the promise of such a cultural gem for Newport, complete with formal gardens, it remains in a seemingly endless state of construction. London's Daily Mail noted that neighbors were calling the project "an eyesore."
Sailor, Musk Backer and Hawaiian Island Owner
In March of 2021 it was first reported that Ellison bought a Hawaiian island for $300 million.
Business Insider reported, “Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison is making the Pineapple Island his full-time home. Ellison revealed last year that he has moved to Lanai, Hawaii, amid the coronavirus pandemic. He plans to use ‘the power of Zoom to work’ from the island, he wrote in an email to Oracle employees, who had been asking about Ellison's plans in the wake of Oracle moving its headquarters to Austin, Texas.”
And, Ellison has poured a billion into Elon Musk's deal to buy Twitter. That deal is presently on hold.
Ellison is the 11th-richest person in the world, with a net worth of about $85 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Trump and Ellison
Ellison had strong ties to Trump.
"[Ellison] became a major political power broker during the Trump administration, hosting the president in 2020 for a fundraiser at his estate in California’s Coachella Valley and contributing millions to Republican candidates and committees, including to Graham, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission," reports the Post.
"During the Trump administration, in 2020, Oracle partnered with the Department of Health and Human Services to collect data from doctors treating coronavirus infections with hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malaria drug touted by the president, among other drugs. That fall, it won praise from Trump as a 'great company' as it became the preferred U.S. buyer of TikTok, in a potential deal with Chinese company ByteDance that did not come to fruition," the Post wrote.
"Ellison’s participation in the call was confirmed by a participant, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private matters. This person said Ellison, as a technology executive, may have been enlisted to assess claims about voting machines made by Sidney Powell, a onetime member of Trump’s legal team. And the person said the GOP megadonor was probably looped in by Graham, as part of a discussion about whether the Trump campaign had assembled an effective legal team," according to the Post.
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