In the middle of the night, Larry Ellison's sailing team negotiated the streets of New York to deliver the25-metre BMW Oracle yacht to its pedestal at the base of Rockefeller Center. There, the challenger for the 2007 America's Cup is on display through next week, a gleaming tribute to the Oracle founder's nautical aspirations.

The yacht, one of two in the syndicate, had been racing at Valencia, in Spain, but made the 4,000-mile journey without much difficulty. The same cannot be said for Mr Ellison's promised $115m (€91m, £65m) donation to Harvard University, which has yet to make the slightly shorter 3,000-mile trip from Palo Alto, California, to Cambridge, Massachusetts.