In a rare interview, the world's fifth-richest person and Oracle founder talks about the president, the pandemic and his $300 million bet to turn his Hawaiian island into a wellness laboratory.
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While Ellison declined to delve into the specifics of the call, his team confirmed the general details. Trump and Ellison had been publicly linked in February, for a fundraiser at the Rancho Mirage compound that caused employees at the generally apolitical Oracle to walk out in protest. “Be absolutely precise,” Ellison now says. “I said President Trump could use the property. I was not here.” Ellison says he has never given money to Trump but will support any president currently holding the office. “We only have one president at a time,” he explains. “I don’t think he’s the devil—I support him and want him to do well.”
Without a vaccine, doctors around the world are experimenting with medicines to treat COVID-19, from antimalarial drugs to an antiviral used to fight Ebola. Ellison asked Trump if a clearinghouse existed for real-time data about treatment efficacies and outcomes. Trump said no. (The White House declined to discuss the Ellison partnership.)
“Larry said, ‘I will build you a system so doctors and patients can enter information, so we can know what’s happening,’” says David Agus, a cancer doctor who leads the Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine at the University of Southern California and is cofounder of Sensei. “The president said, ‘How much?’ And Larry said, ‘For free.’”
Within a week, Ellison enlisted an undisclosed number of Oracle engineers to work with Agus, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies to create a database for the country’s coronavirus cases. Doctors will register every COVID-19 case being treated with a medication on the Oracle-built website. The system will then send daily emails, to the doctor or the patient, to ask for a progress report on symptoms. As of press time, the team was working to get over legal hurdles and was hopeful the project would launch imminently.
While Ellison’s COVID-19 treatment database can’t come soon enough for information-hungry health officials, it has also sparked a fair amount of concern, most of it involving the president himself. Trump, who before his election was prone to promoting the dangerous vaccination-causes-autism lie, has in recent weeks defaulted to the position of quack-in-chief, touting unproven or half-baked solutions to the public. The fear: that Trump might use certain information to circumvent randomized clinical trials.
“I don’t know how you could be against it,” Agus says. “It’s just about getting real-world evidence of things, and I think that is powerful and important.” He and Ellison support clinical trials, he says—as well as using real-time data in conjunction with them. “We’re not working for President Trump,” Agus adds. “We’re working for the people.”
If he’s right—and public health demands that he is—then this exercise could prove to be another data set for Ellison’s mission of utopia through information. For Ellison, a health nut who plays tennis daily and has given about $1 billion to medical research into cancer and aging, this would be the ultimate use of his case study. “I don’t think it’s about living forever, but . . . if you make it to 60, [you want to be] a fit 60 and enjoy your life and be able to do things,” he says. “I know people who are old at 40. They don’t take care of themselves. They’re not fit. They get depressed.
“All of these things happen,” he concludes, “and I’m sure that does not have to be the case.”