Larry Ellison teams up with Oprah for LA Clippers bid

Billionaires join forces with DreamWorks founder David Geffen to buy basketball team

Oracle boss Larry Ellison is part of a billionaire trio which has confirmed its plans to put in an offer for US basketball team the LA Clippers after its current owner was ousted for making racist remarks.

Ellison - whom Forbes ranks as the world's fifth-richest man thanks to his estimated $50.2bn fortune - is teaming up with media mogul Oprah Winfrey and DreamWorks co-founder David Geffen to table a bid, after the US National Basketball Association (NBA) announced plans to force its current owner to sell up in the face of a race row.

Earlier this week, the owner of NBA team the LA Clippers, Donald Sterling, was fired from his role and banned from the league for life after he was taped telling his girlfriend not to publicly associate with black people nor bring them to games.

Geffen told ESPN that he and his billionaire pals were keen to take over the team.

"The team deserves a better group of owners who want to win," he said. "Larry would sooner die than fail. I would sooner die than fail. Larry's a sportsman. We've talked about this for a long time. Between the three of us, we have a good shot."

He added that he and Ellison would invest in and run the team but Winfrey would just be an investor.

"She thinks it would be a great thing for an important black American to own [another] franchise," he told ESPN.

Ellison is no stranger to splashing the cash and last year handed over an undisclosed sum for Island Air - a Hawaiian airline - to make it easier for him to get to the Hawaiian island of Lanai, which he purchased 98 per cent of the previous year.

He said at the time that he planned to turn the island paradise into a "little laboratory" for sustainable energy, researching solar power and organic farming.