Part 8: Who TF Am I Working For?? | The Ghost of University of Michigan

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Part 8: Who TF Am I Working For?? | The Ghost of University of Michigan

Oxford, $130 Million, and a Wife Nobody Can Remember

Oct 06, 2025

We’ve traced Larry Ellison’s blueprint from Langley to Beijing, from Chicago police protests to Gaza’s AI-generated kill lists. We’ve watched Oracle embed itself into surveillance states, health systems, and war zones. Each chapter has revealed another layer of infrastructure, another node in a network remaking governance itself.

But I’ve been sitting on something for nine months. A gap in the pattern. A question that doesn’t add up: How does an 81-year-old man with CIA roots and $140 billion orchestrate the most audacious consolidation of power in modern history while staying functionally invisible? The answer involves a woman who attended the University of Michigan from 2010 to 2012. Except nobody who was there remembers meeting her.

Her name is Jolin Zhu. Or Keren Zhu. Or maybe something else. And I’ve spent nine months trying to verify she existed the way normal people exist.

The Oxford Deal

December 2024. The University of Oxford announces a strategic alliance with the Ellison Institute of Technology. The deal brings $130 million to one of the world’s most prestigious universities, funded by Larry Ellison’s fortune and positioned as philanthropy.

Ellison even broke his near-total social media silence to post about it. For a man who essentially never posts, this meant something. He talked about his desire to “give back to humanity” and use technology to end world hunger.

This is the same man whose technology had just been used to systematically starve Gaza for eighteen months. But I digress.

The New York Times looked closer at what EIT actually is. Turns out it’s not a research institute. It’s a complicated web of for-profit companies structured to spin research into commercial ventures where Ellison’s entities maintain 51% stakes or more. Venture capital wearing a lab coat.

The credible face of this operation was Professor Sir John Bell, a distinguished immunologist. Until September 2025, when an all-staff email announced Bell was “voluntarily” stepping down. Internal reports told a different story. Ellison had grown increasingly hands-on and increasingly unhappy. The for-profit vision was clashing with academic expectations. Several high-level executives left quickly.

Ellison’s chosen replacement: Santa Ono, immediate past president of the University of Michigan.

University of Michigan. I stopped cold when I saw that name.

The Google Alert

November 2024. I got an alert with a headline about University of Michigan football. This made no sense. I only set alerts for Larry Ellison. I don’t follow sports. Why am I getting this?

I opened it. Photo of Ellison sitting courtside at a tennis tournament next to a young Chinese woman. The article was about Michigan’s Champion Circle booster group announcing they’d flipped five-star quarterback Bryce Underwood from LSU to Michigan. Deal reportedly worth $10-12 million. In their statement, they thanked two people: Larry Ellison and his wife, Jolin Zhu.

Wife. Wife? WIFE??!

Larry Ellison. Five times divorced. 81 years old. Famously single for years. Had a wife. And nobody knew about her.

The Investigation Starts

I did what anyone would do. I went looking. Message boards. University of Michigan blogs. Alumni networks. Sports forums where people dissect recruiting with religious intensity. Someone had to know something about the woman married to one of the richest men alive.

Nothing.

The Daily Mail had done their own investigation. According to them, Jolin Zhu was an international student at Michigan from 2010-2012. Chinese national. Studied international relations. They also claimed she and Ellison had been married for three years (though they had been spotted together as early as six years ago).

Six years. Secret marriage for three years. Coming to light through a college football announcement.

But here’s where it gets strange. When journalists tried to verify her enrollment at Michigan, they couldn’t find any record of Jolin Zhu attending the school.

They did find a Keren Zhu. Same graduation year, same timeframe, same international studies program. So maybe Jolin is an Americanized nickname. Fine. That’s common for international students.

Except when they tried to find people who actually knew her, classmates from that era, professors from her program, they found nothing. Not one person recalled her.

The only potential connection anyone could establish: an alleged roommate named Ang Zhu. Nuclear engineering PhD student. We’ll come back to him because that’s its own rabbit hole.

Beyond that and the university confirming someone by that name attended, there’s nothing.

The List

I started making a list of everyone who claimed no memory of her:

Michigan classmates
Roommates from Ann Arbor
PhD advisors (no records found)
Research collaborators (none identified)
Neighbors in Redwood Shores, California
Current neighbors in Woodside, California
The sailing community in Newport, where Ellison summers
Financial journalists covering Oracle

Six years married to one of the most scrutinized billionaires on Earth. Not a single person in any adjacent community could verify meeting her.

Almost.

The Portnoy Call

There is exactly one person who claims to have met Jolin Zhu. He provided the only public account we have of her personality, her motivations, her existence as a human being rather than a name on paper.

Dave Portnoy. Barstool Sports.

Yes. We’re in that timeline now.

Portnoy tells the story on his podcast. He’s a Michigan fan. He’d been publicly trying to help land Bryce Underwood, offering his own money. Then Michigan’s football program called. There’s another donor who wants to help. She’s a huge Barstool fan. Her name is Jolin. Oh, and her husband is Larry Ellison.

They set up a Zoom call.

According to Portnoy, Jolin said: “I went to Michigan during the Brady Hoke era, and I never want to live through something like that again. I have two kids. I can’t stomach waking up on Saturday mornings knowing we’re not the best team on the field.”

Two kids.

Not Larry’s adult children in Hollywood. Her children. Young children. A secret family nobody knew existed, casually revealed on a Zoom call with a sports media personality.

I believe Portnoy’s account is honest. But I also recognize what happened here. This was controlled exposure. Give Portnoy enough direct experience (a real Zoom call with real people) so he can credibly confirm they exist. Portnoy talks about it because that’s what Portnoy does. The story spreads through Barstool’s audience. A narrative takes hold without traditional verification.

You create a credible witness who can testify to a reality no one else can verify.

The Network Angle

Now consider the infrastructure. Which networks air Michigan football? CBS and Fox.

Who owns CBS? Paramount.

Who bought Paramount this year? The Ellison family, through David Ellison’s Skydance Media.

That $10-12 million investment in Bryce Underwood isn’t just about winning games. If Underwood performs, Michigan games become must-watch television. Viewership flows to networks Ellison controls. Ad revenue follows.

This is the pattern we’ve documented throughout this series. Crisis creates opportunity. Oracle positions itself as indispensable infrastructure. Media amplifies the approved narrative.

Except this time, the infrastructure isn’t just technical. It’s human.

The Timeline

Look at what connects:

2010-2012: A woman named Keren Zhu attends Michigan as an international student. This overlaps with Trump’s first presidential campaign ramp-up and increasing scrutiny of visa policies.

2019: Six years before the 2024 announcement puts the marriage around 2019. That’s the same year Oracle abruptly laid off 1,600 engineers in China and Ellison began publicly reframing China as a “threat.”

2021: Project MENTA begins in Israel. EIT breaks ground on its Jerusalem bunker. Oracle loses Project Nimbus but builds its own military-grade cloud infrastructure anyway.

2024: EIT announces its Oxford partnership. Santa Ono (Michigan’s president) is positioned to take over when Bell departs.

November 2024: The Michigan football announcement reveals Jolin Zhu’s existence for the first time.

September 2025: Bell steps down. Ono takes over EIT.

Every piece serves a function. Michigan provides academic credibility and media reach. Oxford provides international legitimacy and research infrastructure. Israel provides the laboratory. Gaza provides the proof of concept.

And the mystery wife provides... what exactly?

The Roommate

Remember Ang Zhu? The alleged roommate. Nuclear engineering PhD at Michigan during the exact timeframe Keren/Jolin attended.

Nuclear engineering. Not computer science. Not business. Not any obvious path connecting to Oracle or Silicon Valley. Nuclear engineering connects to weapons systems, military applications, dual-use technology that intelligence services care about deeply.

I haven’t finished investigating Ang Zhu. But his presence in this story, the only concrete human connection to Jolin/Keren anyone can establish, doesn’t feel random.

The Infrastructure of Disappearance

The point isn’t whether Jolin Zhu is real or fake. She almost certainly exists. There are official records, a Zoom call with Portnoy, university enrollment under the name Keren Zhu. The unsettling part is how someone can be real and yet leave no trace in human memory.

Throughout this series, we’ve documented how Ellison operates. He embeds Oracle into infrastructure so fundamental it becomes invisible. The CIA’s database. China’s Golden Shield. Israel’s military cloud. America’s COVID registry. TikTok’s data custody. The pattern isn’t dominance through visibility. It’s dominance through disappearance. Becoming so embedded in the system that removing you would collapse it.

A wife who exists in official records but not in anyone’s lived experience serves the same function as a database nobody knows they’re in. She’s real enough to check boxes. But she leaves no footprint in human relationships that could be mapped, verified, or understood.

In intelligence work, this is called legend-building. You create a backstory that checks official boxes but dissolves under scrutiny. The gaps aren’t bugs. They’re features. They make the story unfalsifiable. You can’t disprove what you can’t access.

The Utility

Consider what a phantom wife provides:

Academic access. Through Michigan connections, you can influence university policy, research priorities, donor networks. You can position your chosen candidates (like Santa Ono) for roles that matter (like running your Oxford operation).

Media capture. Through athletic donations that drive viewership to networks you control, you shape what millions watch, when they watch it, what advertisements run during those windows.

Political insulation. A Chinese wife (or the appearance of one) complicates narratives about your China relationships. Are you pro-China? Anti-China? The ambiguity itself is useful. It makes simple stories impossible.

Operational security. If scrutiny intensifies, you claim the relationship is private, personal, none of anyone’s business. The same privacy that prevents verification also prevents investigation.

Most importantly: she’s mobile. She can be whoever the moment requires. Chinese national to soften Oracle’s pivot away from Beijing. Michigan alumna to justify football investments. Young mother to humanize an 81-year-old with a CIA past. Barstool fan to win over a specific demographic.

The story adapts because the story isn’t constrained by reality.

The Real Infrastructure

This isn’t a sidebar to the main investigation. This is the investigation.

We’ve spent seven parts documenting how Ellison builds invisible infrastructure. Databases, clouds, bunkers, algorithms. But the most sophisticated infrastructure isn’t technical. It’s social.

You don’t just control the pipes. You control the people who decide what flows through them. You don’t just own the networks. You own the narratives about who owns them.

In China, Oracle was the foreign contractor embedding into someone else’s system. In Israel, Oracle built the system itself, using the state as laboratory. In America, the approach is more elegant. You don’t need to be the state if you can be the infrastructure the state depends on. And you don’t need to be visible if you can be essential.

A wife who doesn’t exist in any verifiable sense but exists in every official sense is infrastructure. She’s a node in the network. A variable in the system. A legend that serves whatever purpose the moment demands.

What I Still Don’t Know

I don’t know the full truth about Jolin Zhu. I don’t know if she and Keren Zhu are the same person, or why the names don’t match university records. I don’t know about the two children or the exact timeline of the marriage or why literally no one from her supposed past remembers her.

What I know is this: For nine months, I’ve been trying to verify basic facts about a woman connected to one of the most powerful men on Earth. Every trail evaporates. Official records say one thing. Lived experience says another. The gap between them is where the system operates.

She exists. But she exists in a way that makes investigation impossible. And that impossible-to-investigate quality is itself a form of infrastructure.

That gap is growing. As Oracle embeds deeper into governance infrastructure (health systems, military operations, media networks, academic institutions), the space between official reality and verifiable reality expands.

We’re living in that gap right now. We use systems we don’t see, built by people we can’t verify, serving interests we can’t map. The man building those systems has learned, over five decades, how to disappear into them.

The ghost of University of Michigan isn’t a mystery to be solved. She’s a preview of what comes next. A world where power operates through infrastructure so embedded that questioning it feels paranoid, even as evidence of its reach accumulates daily. A world where people are real but simultaneously unknowable. Where verification becomes impossible not because records are missing but because the gap between official reality and lived experience is the system itself.

In Part IX, we’ll dig into Ang Zhu and what I found about Michigan’s international student programs during the Trump-era visa crackdowns. The numbers don’t add up. When patterns don’t make sense, it usually means someone worked hard to make them look random.

You’re already in the system. The question is whether you can see it.