Blair and the Billionaire

After leaving office, Tony Blair founded such a flurry of initiatives, from charitable foundations to paid consultancies, that it’s been hard to bring the big one into focus. The Tony Blair Institute of Global Change (TBI) dwarfs the other work, just as it towers over other UK-based think tanks.

Much of the reporting on it has focused on Blair himself, ever newsworthy, his Davos lifestyle and meetings with the world’s rich and powerful. But the TBI isn’t just a UK concern, it’s now a global force working in at least 45 countries, employing other former heads of state, ex ministers and civil servants and paying more than a million dollars to its top earners.

While previous Blair vehicles ranged around from development and peacebuilding to reputational work for petro-states, the TBI has an overwhelming focus: technology.

The ex-premier’s trademark evangelism is now focused on AI, its power to transform government and why everyone should listen to Larry Ellison, the founder of technology firm Oracle.

While the institute relies on Blair’s political brand, its money comes, in large part, from Ellison, who has had a remarkable 2025. He was briefly the richest man in the world in September, as Oracle’s stake in AI infrastructure drove its share price into orbit. In the 1990s Ellison was known as “the man who would be Gates” as he battled the Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, for pre-eminence. This year, the 81 year old has been feted by US President Donald Trump as the “CEO of everything” and an essay in the New York Times called him the billionaire “who will soon own the news” as his family’s media interests in Paramount-Sky Dance seem set to expand to include Warner Bros. Discovery.

Ellison invested $130 million in the TBI between 2021 and 2023, with a further $218 million pledged since then. The scale of funding took the TBI from a headcount of 200 to approaching 1,000. Blair himself takes no salary from TBI but over this time the institute has been able to recruit from bluechip firms like McKinsey and Silicon Valley giants Meta. In 2018 before the Oracle founder’s funding surge, TBI’s best-paid director earned $400,000. In 2023, the last year where accounts are available, the top earner took home $1.26 million.

Blair and Ellison have a relationship that goes back to the former’s time in office. In 2003 Ellison and Blair, then in his pomp, had a photo opportunity at Downing Street to mark a gift of supplies to 40 specialist schools. In tech circles this is known as “land and expand”. Oracle has since been contracted hundreds of times by the British government and earned £1.1 billion in public sector revenue since the start of 2022, according to data collected by procurement analysts Tussell.

METHODS

The full extent of Ellison funding for the TBI became clear from the institute’s own accounts and a survey of US non-profit financial data, including that of the Larry Ellison Foundation, through which major donations were made to both the TBI and the Tony Blair Foundation.

Lighthouse Reports and UK partner Democracy for Sale then spent four months interviewing 29 current and former TBI staff, most on condition of anonymity, to build an insider account of the institute. This work included conversations with over a dozen former TBI employees who advised or drew up policy recommendations for governments across nine countries in the Global South and revealed how their work ranged from explicitly promoting Oracle’s services and acting as a “sales engine” to recommending tech solutions that are potentially harmful or bizarrely divorced from local realities. Former staff described a symbiotic relationship between TBI and Oracle, with the two entities holding joint retreats, and one ex-employee characterising them as “inseparable”.

This testimony was supported by public documents and those obtained under the UK’s freedom of information laws. Matched with interviews, they revealed an organisation unusually close to the British government, holding regular meetings with ministers in which they push policy recommendations that serve Oracle’s interests.

STORYLINES

There is a reason why men whose fortunes are built on AI investments would target the UK, and that is the National Health Service (NHS) and its unique population-level health data. Tech experts talk about Britain’s health records in almost hushed tones. While Europe and the US have some comparable health data sets – such as US veterans’ medical records – none have the depth and breadth of NHS records dating back to 1948. Its potential commercial value, from drugs to genome sequencing has been estimated at up to £10bn per annum.

When Labour came to power last July it did so promising economic growth and an end to the UK’s productivity crisis. Just five days after Keir Starmer was elected, Blair told the TBI’s ‘Future of Britain’ conference that AI was the “game-changer” they were looking for. Within months, Starmer was parroting Blair’s language – and the TBI was in the box seat of the government’s nascent AI policy pushing Oracle’s interests and its founder’s world view.

The FOI documents highlight two TBI staff who took direct, influential roles in government and reveal the institute’s influence over Peter Kyle, a former advisor in Blair’s second term, who was appointed technology secretary despite little experience in the sector, and came into office calling for governments to show “a sense of humility” to Big Tech companies.

At the same time the TBI’s policy director Charlotte Refsum was invited into the UK health department to meet digital policy chief Felix Greaves. She was later given an official role in a government working group advising on data and technology policy in Labour’s 10 year plan for the NHS.

Throughout this period, the TBI has championed initiatives designed to unify public data, including a national data library (NDL). The NDL was little more than an idea when Labour put it in their election manifesto. And there are still competing visions for what it should be. AI boosters foresee data from across government used for training and inference by Large Language Models; while many tech experts want to minimise privacy risks inherent in pooling data from so many sources and ensure that any benefits accrue to the UK.

Ellison told Blair of his interest in NHS data when he was interviewed by him at the Dubai World Governments Summit in February 2025: “The NHS in the UK has an incredible amount of population data,” Ellison enthused, but it was “fragmented”.

Two weeks later, Blair’s institute published a report entitled Governing in the Age of AI: Building Britain’s National Data Library. In it, the not-for-profit institute echoed Ellison on the UK’s data infrastructure, calling it “fragmented and unfit for purpose”.

“There is a real hard sell going on here that says: ‘these kinds of gains are inevitable.’ But they are not,” said Professor Gina Neff of Queen Mary University London. “TBI is not advocating for building that capacity within the NHS. They are saying: let’s outsource to our buddies.”

Multiple staff working for TBI during the Ellison cash injection speak of a sea change in culture. McKinsey consultants took senior positions and clashed with staff from humanitarian and development backgrounds. Ex-employees say this led to the institute pivoting away from writing reports and recommendations by well-meaning development experts towards pushing aggressive tech solutions across the board.

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, Blair’s key advisor Macon-Cooney and Awo Ablo — who came to sit on the board of both TBI and Oracle sometimes present. 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.

This sat uncomfortably with many TBI staff, with some describing having to push Oracle’s technology despite knowing they were not in the best interests of the country in question, and even had the potential to cause harm.

The risk of so-called vendor-lock in – tying a buyer to a single supplier – was a source of unease, with one former staffer saying that advising governments to use Oracle cloud services risked “trapping” and “indebting” them in systems that are “initially free but will start charging in future”.

Rwanda, a country where TBI has been present for more than 15 years, was so frustrated with Oracle that it issued a public tender in 2021 for a database management system, stating that it had been “experiencing a very high cost for support and licensing for Oracle systems and it would like to migrate to an affordable system”.

Marvin Akuagwuagwu worked as a data analyst for TBI’s Africa Advisory unit in 2022 and 2023, focusing on Covid vaccine delivery. He said when he raised legitimate concerns, such as a lack of power supply and cyber security threats, when introducing new technologies to African countries these were dismissed by more senior colleagues.

“I’m an African, I have lived experience, and I’m saying these things, but I wasn’t being listened to. You have to downplay those negative things,” he said.

This investigation was part of the series “The invisible Hand of Big Tech” led by Agência Pública and by Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodística (CLIP), with the participation of 16 other organizations from 13 countries: ICL (Brasil), Núcleo (Brasil), La Bot (Chile), Primícias (Ecuador), Factum (El Salvador), Televisa N+ (Mexico), Cuestión Pública (Colombia), El Diario AR (Argentina), El Surti (Paraguay), IJF (Canada), Tech Policy Press (US), Tempo (Indonesia), Crikey (Australia), Daily Maverick (South Africa), Reporters Without Borders (International), El Veinte.

CO-PUBLICATIONS

• The New Statesman: Inside the Tony Blair Institute
• Democracy for Sale: Inside the Tony Blair Institute