On 24 March, a small group of activists from Led By Donkeys approached Musashi by speedboat while the vessel was moored on the French Riviera and fixed large lettering to the hull, “renaming” it ‘The Trump Propagandist.’ They filmed the action, published footage across social media platforms and within hours it had circulated around the world. The vessel is owned by Larry Ellison, co-founder of US tech giant Oracle and, according to Bloomberg, the sixth-wealthiest person in the world with a net worth estimated at $201 billion.

Ellison, 81, has become one of the most prominent figures in the orbit of President Donald Trump’s second administration. Oracle is a core equity partner in the $500 billion AI infrastructure initiative, Stargate, which Trump announced on his first full day back in office in January this year. Just days ago, the tech mogul was appointed to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, alongside figures including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sergey Brin and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.

But the Ellison family’s rapid expansion into media shapes the context of the recent protest. Ellison funded his son, David, in the Paramount Skydance takeover of CBS, a deal approved under Trump after a $16 million defamation settlement. David Ellison then installed Bari Weiss as CBS News editor-in-chief, sparking departures. The family now seeks to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, aiming for editorial influence over two major networks. Oracle leads investment in the new US entity that controls TikTok following the platform’s divestiture from ByteDance. The Ellison-led consortium governs content moderation for 170 million American users.

The British guerrilla protest group has been active since 2018, opposing Brexit and performing various stunts. The activists notably projected images of Trump and the late convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein onto the walls of Windsor Castle during Trump’s state visit to the UK in late 2025, leading to the arrest of four activists on suspicion of malicious communications. All were subsequently released without charge.

In the video documenting their action, the group states:

“[Ellison is a] big Donald Trump supporter and a close friend of Benjamin Netanyahu. He once offered the Israeli prime minister a job at his company and Netanyahu’s family has holidayed on his private island. Ellison is also the largest private donor to the Israeli military. Trump recently handed the Ellison family control of TikTok in the U.S. Almost immediately, prominent pro-Palestinian voices were silenced. Last year, the Ellisons bought Paramount, giving them control of CBS News. The channel’s coverage of the attack on Iran has been notably pro-war, and the Ellisons will soon take over Warner Brothers, giving them control of CNN. U.S. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth recently denounced CNN for being insufficiently supportive of Trump's war on Iran. Hegseth said he “couldn’t wait for the Ellisons to take over the channel,” and Trump himself listed the CNN takeover as one of his ‘wins.’ And that is why we renamed the superyacht, ‘The Trump Propagandist.’”

The group ends the video with “The billionaires are buying up the news to support their friends, the politicians pitching our world into chaos and war. Then they jump onto their superyachts, accountable to nobody.” What we are seeing is a superyacht functioning as a symbol of the impunity that Led By Donkeys argue Ellison represents.

This is an uncomfortable moment for an industry employing tens of thousands whose work is separate from the politics of vessel owners. Musashi’s crew, the shipyards and supply chains that service the vessel do not direct Ellison’s actions. But when a vessel becomes the canvas on which those affiliations are displayed, the distinction between the two is not one the wider world tends to observe.

This action has not happened in a vacuum, nor is it without precedent. In September 2016, comedian Simon Brodkin sailed a small boat to Sir Philip Green’s Lionheart in Monaco and attached a banner dubbing it ‘BHS Destroyer,’ following Green’s role in the collapse of the UK department store group, BHS, which left a £571 million pension deficit and cost up to 11,000 people their jobs.

The environmental movement has been the more persistent actor in targeting yachts, particularly those owned by prominent industrial figures. Walmart heiress Nancy Walton Laurie’s 110 metre Oceanco Kaos was twice attacked by members of Extinction Rebellion and Scientist Rebellion, who spray-painted the vessel with red paint in Ibiza in July 2023 and again at Marina Port Vell in Barcelona that September, unfurling a ‘Billionaires should not exist’ banner on each occasion. The following May, the same groups returned to Port Vell and doused the 138-metre Lürssen Rising Sun and the 47-metre Baglietto Lion with black paint, demanding an end to fossil fuel subsidies.

Under Article 322-1 of the French Code pénal, affixing unauthorised inscriptions or signs to a vehicle belonging to another person is a criminal offence, even where only minor damage results. The activists attached a vinyl sticker to the hull. Whether that caused damage beyond the “minor threshold” and therefore whether the more serious penalty of up to two years’ imprisonment and a €30,000 fine applies, or the lesser fine of €3,750, is a matter for a French court to determine.

There is the obvious question of security. How activists managed to reach and fix the signage on the hull without intervention remains unanswered at the time of writing. The exact circumstances of how access to the water was gained and whether any port security protocols were breached are not yet established. SuperyachtNews has approached the local port authority for comment.

But the broader question is whether the sector is adequately prepared for politically targeted, professionally organised activism. Led By Donkeys is hardly a fringe operation with a can of paint. It has the resources to distribute footage to a global audience within hours. Its choice of a yacht as the vehicle for a message about billionaire political power reflects a clear-eyed awareness that vessels offer a visible, relatively accessible surface on which to make the point. As the geopolitical climate intensifies and the owners of the largest vessels become increasingly prominent figures in contested global politics, the frequency and sophistication of incidents of this kind is the question the market will have to confront.

If you have any information or a view you would like to share, get in touch at newsdesk@thesuperyachtgroup.com

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