The Ellison infotainment empire financed by father Larry and nominally helmed by son David, may have peaked with the shareholder approval of Paramount-Skydance’s purchase of WBD (Warner Bros Discovery).
Kings of Ellison Infotainment Empire Pre-Celebrates With Trump
The NY Times tells the tale of last Thursday’s big party in D.C.:
David Ellison, the billionaire media mogul, feted President Trump and top members of his administration at a private dinner in Washington on Thursday as his company, Paramount, seeks federal sign-off on a $111 billion deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery.
The gathering, at the U.S. Institute of Peace, included top executives and journalists from CBS News, which Paramount owns. Bari Weiss, the network’s editor in chief, joined Mr. Ellison at Mr. Trump’s table, and Norah O’Donnell, the former “Evening News” anchorwoman, also attended, according to two people briefed on details of the closed-door event.
Among the guests was Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general. Mr. Blanche oversees the Justice Department, whose antitrust division is set to review the Warner Bros. acquisition. The deal would place CNN and HBO, among other outlets, under Mr. Ellison’s control. Paramount’s chief legal officer, Makan Delrahim, also sat with Mr. Trump, the people said.
…it is rare for a national media organization to sponsor an event intended to fete the powerful politicians who are covered by its news division, and rarer still when it has a major transaction pending before the federal government. Invitations to the event, which were distributed by Paramount and listed Mr. Ellison as the host, described the evening as “honoring the Trump White House.”
How cozy!
However, by Sunday’s 60 Minutes interview with Trump and O’Donnell, things were already much less cozy:
O’DONNELL: In his manifesto, he wrote that ‘I’m no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.’ What’s your reaction?
TRUMP: I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would because you’re horrible people. I’m not a… pic.twitter.com/zaZhcRwbWJ
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 26, 2026
Politico transcribed some lowlights from their conversation:
when O’Donnell, during an interview recorded at the White House on Sunday, quoted from the accused gunman Cole Allen’s apparent manifesto — “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” she read — Trump, who’d been relatively subdued in his responses, flashed a familiar anger.
“I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would, because you’re horrible people. Horrible people,” Trump said. “Yeah, he did write that. I’m not a rapist. I didn’t rape anybody.”
O’Donnell interjected, “Oh, do you think he was referring to you?”
But the president blew past her question, declaring, “I’m not a pedophile.”
Trump bristled at what he seemed to deem an insinuation about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, who was not mentioned by name in the manifesto or by O’Donnell. “You read that crap from some sick person,” the president said. “I got associated with stuff that has nothing to do with me. I was totally exonerated.”
Trump may have been “totally exonerated” (after all, who is your humbler blogger to question the POTUS?), but Oracle’s share price isn’t.
Financially, This Beast Peaked Last Year
For Mr. Market, the Ellison infotainment empire peaked last year, when Father Larry was briefly the wealthiest man in the world after announcing some vapor ware deals with OpenAI (more on this below):
pic.twitter.com/APfUVvACQl
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) April 27, 2026
pic.twitter.com/196Ll5xzyy
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) April 27, 2026
Based on son David Ellison’s compensation from Paramount last year, this is a heady peak indeed, per Variety:
Paramount Skydance chairman and CEO David Ellison, who is in the midst of trying close a massive deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, had a pay package worth $63.2 million last year — mostly in stock that vests over five years.
But when you consider that a guy that resigned a couple weeks back got almost as much as the nepo-baby kinglet himself, maybe David is actually underpaid:
Jeff Shell, who resigned as Paramount’s president earlier this month to “focus” on a breach-of-contract lawsuit filed against him, had a total compensation package worth $60.68 million. The company disclosed the executive compensation in an SEC filing Friday.
Given the scope of the Ellison infotainment empire, maybe that’s a reasonable amount of compensation.
Or maybe not, given that shareholders voted down former WBD CEO David Zaslav’s massive payout for destroying the company his role in selling the company to the Ellison infotainment empire. Too bad the vote was non-binding! Joke’s on you, shareholders.
But let’s get back to looking at the profile of this new media beast prowling the landscape.
Paramount-WBD Gonna Be Big
Nielson can help us understand the scope of the new behemoth, at least on the streaming side of its business:
Nielson’s The Gauge February 2026 https://t.co/o7Qjj3Tasc pic.twitter.com/FGpxTxnqPd
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) April 27, 2026
This chart shows the trends of televisual consumption in the US over the past year, streaming up, cable down, broadcast steady:
pic.twitter.com/47BqXa6X66
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) April 27, 2026
PBS also takes a look at the scope of the combined entity:
In the U.S., according to streaming guide JustWatch, HBO Max controlled about 12% of on-demand subscriptions in the first quarter of this year — compared to 3% for Paramount+. Combining those two services would still fall slightly below Prime Video’s 17% market share, and the 19% of the market commanded by Netflix. Disney owns about 27% of the market between Hulu and Disney+.
Beyond HBO Max, Paramount would also acquire Warner’s smaller Discovery+ streamer. And apart from Paramount+, Paramount owns Pluto TV and BET+, too.…CNN would come under the same roof as Paramount-owned CBS. That would bring together two of America’s biggest names in television news, although whether CNN would continue to operate as a separate brand from CBS has yet to be confirmed.
Since coming under Skydance ownership less than a year ago, CBS has already seen significant shifts in editorial leadership. It’s taken steps to appeal to more conservative viewers in its news operations, notably with the installation of Free Press founder Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News. If the company’s proposed Warner takeover is successful, many expect similar changes at CNN.
Some officials in the Trump administration have also made their opinions very clear about CNN’s future ownership. In March, the White House attacked CNN for its coverage of the U.S. and Israel’s war against Iran — and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told reporters that “the sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”
Ellison has said that editorial independence “will absolutely be maintained” under Paramount ownership. “It’s maintained at CBS. It’ll be maintained at CNN,” Ellison told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” in March, while noting that his company wants to speak to “the 70%” of viewers who he said identify as center-left or center-right.
It’s almost painful to see the lengths that PBS (and every other entity in the MSM) goes to elide the fact that the primary political concern of the owners of the Ellison infotainment empire is their properties’ coverage of Israel rather than any sort of commitment to “conservatism” or effort to reach the imaginary “70%” of viewers in “the center.”
Interestingly, this is one of those topics that the Israeli press discusses quite openly, see this from The Times of Israel:
Critics view the Ellisons as more conservative and friendly to the Trump administration and Israel than many legacy media outlets…
US President Donald Trump has been harshly critical of CNN coverage and backed the Ellisons, and US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has supported the CNN acquisition.
Oracle’s Larry Ellison, who was raised in a Reform Jewish household, is a longtime supporter of Jewish and Israeli causes. Ellison is the world’s wealthiest Jewish individual and one of the richest people alive, briefly surpassing Tesla CEO Elon Musk last year.
He has a record of pro-Israel philanthropy and ties to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Oracle has also had business ties in Israel for more than 20 years. The company has hundreds of employees in Israel, built an underground data center in Jerusalem for $319 million in 2021, and supported Israeli first responders with fundraising after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack.…The new merger would put CBS and CNN under the umbrella of two business leaders with longstanding ties to Israel: Larry Ellison and his son David. Their expanding media empire has alarmed liberal newsrooms, White House critics and anti-Zionist activists.…At the same time, it owns a significant stake in short-form video network TikTok’s US business operations. American Jewish leaders have blamed TikTok for allowing antisemitism to spread on its platform among young people.
Skydance, run by David Ellison — the Oracle co-founder’s son — also donated to Magen David Adom after the October 7 attack. “Skydance stands with Israel,” the company said at the time.
Paramount condemned a Hollywood boycott of Israel last year, becoming the first major studio to push back, saying, “Silencing individual creative artists based on their nationality does not promote better understanding or advance the cause of peace.”
Paramount has distributed several series or films related to the October 7 attack, including “The Children of October 7,” “We Will Dance Again,” and “Red Alert.”
Interestingly, the American opponents of the merger avoid that particular issue as well.
Hollywood Royalty Stand Opposed
Despite the WBD shareholder approval, the deal isn’t quite done yet.
It’s opposed by Hollywood royalty for one thing, per Variety:
…a new batch of Hollywood A-listers including Robert De Niro, Sofia Coppola and Holly Hunter have signed on to an open letter opposing the Paramount-WBD combination, citing the threat of lost jobs, higher costs for consumers, and fewer TV shows and movies.
As of Thursday morning, the letter had 4,194 total signatories after launching on April 13 with 1,000 names. Organizers said the list of film and entertainment industry union members, actors, and directors includes more than 75 Oscar winners and nominees.
Senator Elizabeth Warren and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani are opposed, too, FWIW.
Can the States Stop the Ellison Infotainment Empire?
More significantly, the California Attorney General has raised “red flags” about the merger:
“We are looking at investigating the … proposed merger,” Bonta told former CBS News correspondent Scott Macfarlane. “This is not a done deal. They have not passed regulatory scrutiny. There are red flags everywhere. We still have time if that’s what we decide. But we are in the investigation phase. So we haven’t decided yet our formal position.”
Bonta, citing media reports of Paramount’s proposed $6 billion in cost synergies, wonders if the merger will negatively impact content choices, competition and the local labor market, among other issues.
“We see indications that all those things will happen,” said Bonta. “That prices will go up for consumers, that wages will go down for workers.”
The American Prospect points out some of the challenges facing state AG’s who want to stop this:
(State Attorneys General) are in a race against Paramount’s savvy consultants, who are trying to speedrun the deal in a matter of weeks. They are led by Makan Delrahim, former head of the Justice Department Antitrust Division in Donald Trump’s first term, who has been at Ellison’s side for years. Paramount has maneuvered to deliver all necessary information to the Justice Department in advance of the merger agreement. He knows that DOJ will barely even look at that information before blessing a deal they want to see happen. The goal here is to get clearance by April, quickening the rate at which California and any other states would have to act.
The states could challenge the merger even after the feds bless it, but by then, Paramount and Warner Bros. would have likely commingled their assets, engaged in layoffs, and made it very difficult to untangle the merger, particularly for judges who are inherently conservative on these matters. The far preferable option would be for Bonta and company to file a lawsuit before Paramount and Warner Bros. can clinch a deal. That way, they can get a temporary injunction and the two studios would continue to operate as separate companies pending a trial, which would take several months to a year to complete.
Media analyst John Campea posted last month that there are 5 big potential obstacles between the Ellison infotainment empire and control of WBD, one of them has already been cleared:
A coalition of state attorney generals can file aseparate antitrust lawsuit
The debt mountain
The Committee on ForeignInvestment in the United States (CFIUS) national security problem
The March 20th shareholders vote
The European Commission and the UK’sCompetition and Markets Authority
I linked to some pieces about the European options to stop the merger above, but let’s focus on what seems to me to be the more serious obstacle, debt.
Ellison Infotainment Empire Starting Deeply Endebted
NYU marketing prof, podcaster and TV talking head Scott Galloway hates this merger and goes into some detail about the “debt mountain” faced by the Ellisons.
He starts with an entertaining run-through of previous attempts to acquire Warner Bros.:
The story of Warner Bros. is a recurring masterclass in ego cosplaying corporate synergy. The company has undergone seven sales, mergers, or structural separations since 1967. The script remains the same: A new CEO decides Warner Bros. is the missing piece of their legacy, only to find they’ve partnered with a high-maintenance spouse who, after several years, leaves with half of everything the acquiring company used to own.
Victims of this syndrome include Time, Inc., AOL, AT&T, and Discovery as Galloway’s cool infographic illustrates:
pic.twitter.com/w85QXaSWHO
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) April 27, 2026
He also has an incredible dissection of the deal:
What do you get a nepo baby who already has Paramount? A: Warner Bros. According to one study that tracked 3,250 wealthy families over two decades, 90% lose their fortune by the third generation. Prediction: Larry Ellison’s great-grandchildren will never forgive him for providing a personal guarantee so David could go to the Oscars.
While the deal is priced at a multiple of 8x to 12x EBITDA, the “E” is anchored to a linear TV ecosystem that’s unraveling faster than regulators can approve the deal. WBD plus Paramount = 2x the linear headache. Wall Street is being asked to pay a premium for a story whose ending everyone already knows. And if valuation is the rock, leverage is the hard place. Last year the two companies generated a combined operating profit of $11 billion, before depreciation and amortization. The Paramount-WBD combo is two drowning men clinging to each other, hoping the combined weight of their $79 billion in debt will somehow act as a flotation device. It won’t, which is why Paramount’s debt was downgraded to junk status after the Ellisons “won” the WBD bidding war. With his new toy having a leverage ratio north of 6x, David Ellison has promised $6 billion in “synergies” within three years. (Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos put the figure closer to $16 billion, after examining WBD’s books.) Synergies is Latin for layoffs. Additional “synergies” could be found by consolidating HBO Max with Paramount+ into a Franken-streamer no one asked for, merging CNN with CBS News, and going Cleopatra, i.e., selling one or both studio lots to real estate developers. (See: Fox selling 300 acres of its back lot to create Century City.)…With WBD, you’re buying a melting ice cube of linear TV assets wrapped in $40B of debt trading at 5x leverage. One of these companies will be worth $300B in 10 years. The other will be sold for parts to Netflix. The second generation of wealth ensures that the third generation … isn’t. Shari Redstone, Edgar Bronfman Jr., and (now) David Ellison.…The question isn’t what the Ellisons will do with Paramount and WBD, but who will acquire those assets at fire-sale prices when their AI synergy narrative can no longer provide cloud cover for their pair of overleveraged legacy media companies. My prediction: We’ll see this movie again, starring Netflix, Apple, and Amazon as bargain hunters with delusions of grandeur that involve paying a failed CEO hundreds of millions for the right to fire hundreds of thousands of their employees.
And as to what might be the triggering event that brings the Ellison Infotainment Empire down?
Will OpenAI Kill Oracle and the Ellison Infotainment Empire?
That’s what Ed Zitron thinks:
Oracle is taking on a massive amount of debt to build these data centers, working with a labyrinthine network of financiers and construction partners to pull together the capacity necessary to get paid for its five-year-long $300 billion compute deal with OpenAI.
Oracle has also, per Bloomberg, deliberately raised money using “project financing” loans that are repaid using the projected cashflow, allowing it to keep the massive amount of debt off of its balance sheet. This is remarkable — and offensive! — because it’s borrowing over $38 billion to fund construction of its Wisconsin and Shackelford data centers (the largest debt deal of its kind on record) and said debt will now effectively not exist despite its massive drag on Oracle’s cashflow, which sat at negative $24.7 billion in its last quarterly earnings.
…
All of these data centers are being built for a single tenant — OpenAI — which expects, per The Information, to lose over $167 billion (assuming it hits annual revenues of over $100 billion) by the end of 2028, and as a result does not actually have the money to pay Oracle for its compute on an ongoing basis.
In addition to its commitments to Oracle, OpenAI has also made commitments to spend $138 billion on Amazon over eight years, $250 billion on Microsoft Azure over an unspecific period, $20 billion with Cerebras over three years, $22.4 billion with CoreWeave over five years, and a non-specific amount with Google Cloud.
All of this is happening as Oracle’s core businesses plateau, even after Oracle reshuffled them in Q3 FY25 to represent Cloud, Software, Hardware and Services segments, the latter three of which have barely moved in the last 9 months as low-to-negative-margin cloud compute revenue grows.
In other words, Oracle’s only growth comes from a segment requiring hundreds of billions of dollars of compute.
To make matters worse, every single one of these data centers is behind schedule.…Stargate, as it stands, will kill Oracle, outside of OpenAI becoming the literal most-profitable and highest-revenue-generating company of all time within the next two years.…(Oracle’s) collapse would only happen after one of the most brutal declines in shareholder value in modern history. Oracle’s only saving grace for the last few years has been the growth of its cloud infrastructure division, with investors heavily banking on its GPU business for future guidance.
Once that story collapses, so too will any faith in the value of its stock.
George Noble also warns that Oracle could be a very bad bet for investors:
Oracle’s non-current debt has ballooned to $124.7 billion. Up from $85.3 billion a year ago.
A 46% increase in 12 months.
Total liabilities sit at $206 billion against shareholders’ equity of $39 billion. That’s a 5-to-1 leverage ratio on a company being pitched as a “safe” infrastructure play.
But that $124.7 billion isn’t even the full picture…
Oracle has been using project financing structures (loans repaid from projected future cashflow) to keep tens of billions more in borrowing off its balance sheet entirely. So when analysts quote Oracle’s debt load, they’re UNDERSTATING the actual exposure by a meaningful margin.
Interest expense jumped 32% YOY. Free cash flow is negative $24.7 billion on a trailing basis. The company is spending $48 billion a year in capex while generating roughly $17 billion in operating cash flow.
They issued $43 billion in senior notes in 9 months. They are borrowing at a pace that would make a leveraged buyout firm nervous.
And what did they get for all that spending? They fired 30,000 people.
On March 31st, Oracle sent an email at 6 AM to tens of thousands of employees telling them their roles were eliminated. 18% of the global workforce gone in a single morning.
TD Cowen estimates the layoffs save $8 to $10 billion in annual cash flow. Which tells you everything about the math:
Oracle can’t fund $50 billion in AI capex AND keep 162,000 people on payroll. So the people went.
Net income was up 95% last quarter. The stock is still down 47% from its high.
Mr. Market is telling you something.
The earnings look great on paper partly because Oracle extended the useful life of its servers to 6 years, reducing depreciation expense by billions.
Well, haters gotta have hopes too.
Related Posts on the Ellisons, Oracle, Paramount WBD:
Trump Makes an Example Out of Paramount
Larry Ellison + Oracle + AI + Paramount + Trump = Total Info Control
Delusion, Deception and Dipshittery: Hasbara on the 8th Front
Tony Blair and Larry Ellison Make One HELL of a Partnership
Pyrrhic Victory Drives Dystopian High Tech Drive for Control
Bari Weiss Will Run CBS News for the Ellison Hasbara Empire
Hogs at the AI Slop Trough, Gulf States, UFC Edition
Hasbara Ain’t Cheap, Musk, Ellison, Saudis, All Tapped
Informational Force-Feeding Divides and Distracts
Bari Weiss’ CBS Not an Auspicious Beginning to Total Info Control
Oracle Debt and TikTok Transition Troubles Vex the Ellison Media Empire
Paramount Still Reaching for WBD as CBS Misplays Colbert-Talarico Interview
Mask-Off Moment as Paramount at Nexus of AI, Gulf State Financing, and Private Equity
Weak Links Oracle, OpenAI, UAE Are Hammered by Iran War
