David Ellison boasts a cozy relationship with President Trump, a string of right-coded hires and financial allies in the Saudi Arabian government.
He also may be the best hope to save American moviegoing.
It was only a few months ago that Mr. Ellison, the millennial son of the tech billionaire Larry Ellison, spent $8 billion, much of it from his family, to snap up the Paramount media empire, transforming himself almost overnight into a major Hollywood power player. Then on Monday, the younger Mr. Ellison launched a $108.4 billion hostile offer to take over Warner Bros. Discovery, an audacious move given that Warner’s board had already decided to sell much of the company to the Silicon Valley streaming giant Netflix for nearly $83 billion.
Such bids usually fail, as they require convincing a lot of shareholders to defy a company’s board. Yet Mr. Ellison is intent on prevailing. Netflix brass historically have made no secret of their disdain for the movie theater, allowing Mr. Ellison to position himself as a savior from their streamification, atomization and A.I.-driven automation of American culture. The 42-year-old sees himself, and wants us to see him, as not just restoring Paramount, battered in recent years, but Hollywood itself. He promises to launch a new golden age, with the combined Paramount-Warner Bros. unleashing more than 30 movies into theaters every year, a number that harks back to earlier eras of studio dominance.
But there’s a catch. Mr. Ellison was able to ascend to Paramount moguldom thanks in part to his closeness with Mr. Trump, and now he is trying to capitalize on the same bond to win the president’s favor for an even bigger prize. And he has leverage: If he buys Warner Bros., he’d control CNN, one of the few relatively unscathed major television news outlets that is regularly critical of the White House. The Netflix acquisition would exclude the news network.
Mr. Trump always wants his pound of flesh, and any company run by Mr. Ellison would inevitably be prone to influence from the White House, which has pressed media executives to fire people Mr. Trump doesn’t like and promote those he does. In his zeal to save Hollywood, Mr. Ellison is playing a dangerous game. It may well end up devouring him. And combined with the fact that Mr. Trump is leaning toward giving Larry Ellison’s company, Oracle, the nod for a stake in social media powerhouse TikTok, it could inch us scarily close to a culture of state-run media.
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