Larry Ellison Vetted Marco Rubio for Fealty to Israel, Hacked Emails Reveal

The billionaire Oracle founder is on track to take control of the American media.

Our partners at The Ditch over in Ireland have a new story on a German company making weapons for Israel in a Buffalo, New York, plant: “It’s the largest ever shipment of munitions – on its way to the Israeli land forces’ biggest weapons supplier – to Israel identified by The Ditch. The Ocean Gladiator will leave the Port of Paulsboro for Ashdod carrying munitions from Wieland Group – which ‘profited enormously from the armaments orders’ it received from Adolf Hitler’s regime in the early 1940s.”

The story below is another in our series based on previously unreported emails, digging into efforts by Israel and its advocates to shape policy in the nation’s favor. If you haven’t yet, please upgrade to a paid subscription to help make this work possible. Or consider a one-time or recurring tax-deductible contribution.

Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison at the White House with U.S. President Donald Trump on January 21, 2025. Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images.

Everything is coming together for Larry Ellison. The billionaire co-founder of tech giant Oracle, on-and-off-again the richest man in the world and a staunch supporter of Israel, is set to take a lead role in reshaping TikTok in the United States. His son, David Ellison, is moving to take over large swaths of the media, including CBS News, CNN, Warner Brothers, and Paramount, reportedly bringing in the Free Press’s Bari Weiss to shape editorial direction.

“The Ellison family is cornering the market on attention and data the same way the Vanderbilts did railroads and the Rockefellers did oil,” as Wired recently characterized it. How they plan to operate that monopoly is on course to be tested out in what President Donald Trump is calling “New Gaza,” the techno-dystopian free trade zone that is to be administered by a Board of Peace led by Trump and Ellison’s longtime political and business vehicle, Tony Blair. Ellison has given or pledged more than $350 million to the Tony Blair Institute, which Blair has used to advance Ellison’s vision of a marriage between government, corporate power, and tech surveillance. Oracle, by providing database infrastructure and cloud-computing services to other huge enterprises like FedEx and NVIDIA, has quietly become one of the most powerful companies in the world.

As the nation’s top diplomat, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has also played a role in the TikTok talks that steered the company toward Ellison, after playing a lead role as a senator in demonizing the app; he was also closely involved in the rollout of Trump’s plan for Gaza’s future, which hands the enclave to Blair. Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner tasked the Blair Institute in the spring with coming up with a post-war plan for Gaza, which was recently completed, the Times of Israel reported.

That Rubio finds himself in such a central position is in part thanks to Ellison, who has been a major patron of the Cuban-American former senator from Florida. Ellison first vetted Rubio for his fealty toward Israel back in early 2015, according to previously unreported email correspondence reviewed by Drop Site. Rubio rose to prominence as a Tea Party-backed conservative Senate upstart in 2010, launching a presidential campaign in the 2016 cycle. As secretary of state, Rubio launched an unprecedented crackdown on speech, detaining and attempting to deport critics of Israel precisely for the crime of their criticism of Israel.

In early 2015, Ellison was emailing Ron Prosor, who was serving in the tail end of his time as Israeli ambassador to the United Nations; he currently serves as the Israeli ambassador to Germany.

At the time, Rubio was seen as a strong challenger in a GOP presidential field that would ultimately include underdog candidate Donald Trump. The emails show the Israeli diplomat and Ellison arranging to meet with one another, with Prosor soliciting Ellison’s views on Rubio as a potential candidate who would advocate on behalf of Israel.

On April 26, 2015, Prosor sent Ellison an email titled “Rubio speech,” asking the Oracle founder and CTO to send him a copy of a speech from the then-candidate. (The emails don’t specify which speech, but Rubio had kicked off his campaign a week earlier with a speech that criticized the Obama administration’s “hostility to Israel.”) The next day the two traded messages indicating that Prosor and Ellison had had dinner together, and that Ellison would soon be meeting Rubio directly. “I had a great time too Ron. I’m looking forward to the next time,” Ellison said, adding, “PS – I’ll tell you how dinner goes with Senator Rubio.”

On April 30, Prosor sent another message to Ellison to follow up, sharing his phone number and thanking him again for the evening they spent together. “How was the conversation with Mario Rubio. [sic] Did he pass your scrutiny? Did you have a chance to talk about Israel ? Would love to chat.”

A few hours later Ellison responded in the affirmative. “Hi Ron. Great meeting with Marco Rubio. I set him up to meet with Tony Blair,” adding, “Marco will be a great friend for Israel.”

Follow-up email exchanges between Prosor and Ellison in April 2015 discussing previous meeting.

A month later, Ellison, who had backed Mitt Romney in 2012, hosted a fundraiser for Rubio at his mansion in Woodside, California. That would be only the beginning of a broader range of support that the tech billionaire would offer in attempting to bolster Rubio’s campaign. Over the course of the 2015-2016 primary Ellison plowed $5 million into the Conservative Solutions super PAC which supported Rubio, who, as Ellison privately hoped, advocated vocally for Israel throughout the course of his presidential bid and beyond.

Ellison’s support for Rubio perplexed some political observers at the time. The CEO of the political crowdfunding platform CrowdPac (now known as Crowdblue) Steven Hilton, told the San Francisco Chronicle that that he found it “interesting” that Ellison, who was not then well-known as a supporter of right-wing causes, “should support a candidate as conservative as Marco Rubio,” speculating that it could “reflect Rubio’s past effort to implement immigration reform, a crucial issue for Silicon Valley leaders like Ellison.”

Requests for comment about the exchange to Ellison, the U.S. State Department, and the Israeli Embassy in Germany where Prosor is currently stationed were not returned.

The correspondence between the Israeli diplomat and Ellison is part of an archive of emails released by Handala, a hacking group suspected of having connections to the Iranian ministry of intelligence. The documents were then obtained by Distributed Denial of Secrets, a non-profit whistleblower and file-sharing website, where they are presently available to a select pool of verified researchers and journalists. While the emails were posted without metadata that would allow their authenticity to be verified, they contain hundreds of photographs, documents, and other information from Prosor and his contacts, including non-public information verified as accurate by Drop Site.

The archive ends in 2016, suggesting that the data had been exfiltrated prior to being posted by Handala in October 2024. The announcement by the “Handala Hack Team” that it had gained access to Prosor’s emails was made around the same time it announced a trove of emails from former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. (Drop Site published a story on September 28 about Jeffrey Epstein brokering an Israeli security agreement with Barak.) The timestamps on those emails indicated Handala was located in the same time zone as Tehran. When Handala posted the Prosor emails, they also threatened Prosor, saying, “Your death is near.”

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change

Ellison has given or pledged more than $350 million to Blair’s world-changing project, making him the largest donor, and helping it expand around the globe, according to a new investigation by the New Statesman and Lighthouse Reports. TBI has effectively become an offshoot of Oracle, the outlets reported, with key Blair advisors sitting on both the boards of Oracle and TBI:

Oracle and TBI’s connections are not just rhetorical. By 2023, joint retreats had become commonplace. At the institute’s headquarters at One Bartholomew Place in London, the teams would convene in the basement with executives from Oracle…Senior TBI employees have been hosted at Oracle’s headquarters in Austin, Texas, coordinated by a TBI employee whose role is to “scale and manage” the partnership with Oracle. Former staff recall that there were other earlier “hush hush” joint retreats at Ellison properties in the US.

“It’s hard to get across just how deeply connected the two [organisations] are,” a former TBI staffer said. “The meetings were like they’re part of the same organisation.”

As the TBI’s partnership with Oracle deepened, employees told us they started to see Oracle staff started to slide into TBI employees’ calendars and schedule meetings in order to find out what the institute was doing in different countries and “scope out opportunities”, recalls one former TBI staffer. Soon employees from the two entities were having regular joint calls.

In other words, if the relationship persists, Ellison and Oracle are positioned to take a lead role in redeveloping Gaza. We don’t have to guess at what type of society Ellison would hope to usher in. On an investor call last year, Ellison said that mass surveillance is an inevitability, and will keep the citizenry on “their best behavior.”

“We’re going to have supervision,” Ellison said. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”

In the months after their discussion about Rubio passing muster as a good advocate for Israel, the leaks suggest that Ellison and Prosor themselves maintained a sporadic email correspondence. Prosor bitterly complained to Ellison about the unfair treatment that he said Israel was receiving at the UN.

In June of that year, Prosor sent Ellison a message stating that he was, “Running with fire extinguishers here at the UN,” and adding that, “Even for UN standards what they are trying to do to Israel is outrageous !!.” At the time, the ambassador was leading a diplomatic effort to push back against a report from the United Nations Human Rights Council that found that Israel had committed human rights abuses during its 2014 war in the Gaza Strip, when Israeli soldiers and war planes killed more than 1,000 Palestinian civilians and wounded more than 11,000. Prosor accused the organization of being “taken hostage by terrorist organizations.”

Towards the end of his tenure at the UN in September 2015, Prosor was involved in another effort to prevent the body from raising a Palestinian flag at the upcoming General Assembly. The Israeli diplomat reached out to Ellison again to give an update on his work. “Just gave my final speech at the General Assembly today on the Palestinian flag issue. They will raise their flag, as the UN raises a white flag, surrendering to all the Palestinians whims and Caprice,” Prosor wrote Ellison.

Signing off, he suggested that they touch base again to continue collaborating on methods to support Israel. Prosor wrote, “I will re-base in Israel, and would love to talk to you about some ideas I have that might coincide with things we spoke about in our last meeting concerning your wish to get more involved in Israel.” The email archive, which tapers off in early 2016, contains no further correspondence.

“Weapons Change Over Time”

Ellison has never been shy about his overwhelming support for Israel. In addition to his growing role as a political power broker, Ellison, who briefly became the richest man in the world this year after a rise in Oracle stock prices, said at a 2014 fundraiser attended by other pro-Israel billionaires, “there is no greater honor” than supporting the Israeli military. In 2017, Ellison gave Friends of the IDF a gift of $16.6 million in 2017, in what was the largest-ever donation to the organization. Ellison is also known to be close to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been a guest at the private Hawaiian island that Ellison owns.

“We believe that we have to embed the love and respect for Israel in the American culture,” said Oracle CEO Safra Catz.

In addition to Ellison’s personal stance, reporting by Responsible Statecraft on a separate set of leaked emails from former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak shows that other top officials at Oracle are aligned with his goal of influencing U.S. public opinion towards Israel. In a 2015 message to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Oracle CEO Safra Catz laid out her own push to shape U.S. public opinion in Israel’s favor, urging him to back a reality show about “Women of the IDF” aimed at burnishing the image of the Israeli military, and arguing that pro-Israel sentiment must be embedded in American culture early to counter the rise of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.

“That means getting the message to the American people in a way they can consume it,” Catz told Barak, adding that, “We believe that we have to embed the love and respect for Israel in the American culture.”

Along with his son David, Ellison’s role as a media power broker is set to grow in the years to come—and Ellison’s role in the multi-billion dollar takeover of TikTok may be his most important attempt to reshape the post-October 7 media environment. As part of the agreement, Oracle will audit TikTok’s all-important content algorithm, which will be “retrained and operated in the United States outside of ByteDance’s control,” according to White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt.

Since the onset of the war and genocide in the Gaza Strip, pro-Israel officials in the U.S. have fixated on TikTok for allegedly being the primary factor driving the rapid decline in support for Israel among young American. That belief has also been echoed by Israeli officials, as well as influential pro-Israel activists like Anti-Defamation League chief Jonathan Greenblatt, who emphasized to an Israeli Knesset hearing earlier this year the importance of “capturing” the app.

Netanyahu himself has been the most forthright about the importance of Israel and its supporters taking control over the video platform—a gift that Ellison now appears ready to grant him.

“’Weapons change over time...the most important ones are on social media,” Netanyahu told a group of pro-Israel influencers assembled at Israel’s Consulate General in New York in September, stating that the acquisition of TikTok was “the most important purchase going on right now.”