David Ellison: America's new media mogul

(Image credit: CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP via Getty Images)

Paramount’s new boss is adamant he intends to keep “politics at arm’s length”. Good luck with that, says Vanity Fair. After this summer’s $8 billion takeover by Skydance, David Ellison, 42, is in “the hot seat” of an impassioned national debate about the future of the media juggernaut and whether it has been captured by Donald Trump.

As CEO of the newly formed Paramount Skydance Corporation, Ellison’s first big appointment has fanned the flames. In a controversial acqui-hire, he is paying $150 million to buy Bari Weiss’s news site, The Free Press, and installing the journalist entrepreneur as editor-in-chief of CBS News. Her pro-Israel and anti-woke views have fuelled speculation that she’ll act as an “ideological commissar” at CBS, helping to “enforce compliance” with the White House line.

This is certainly an “almost existential” moment for the near 100-year-old network, whose new owners have been accused of “kowtowing” to the president after settling a vexatious $16 million lawsuit to get the deal over the line, and cancelling comedian Stephen Colbert when he described it as a “big, fat bribe”.

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Ellison is hardly the patsy “nepo baby” of a Maga-leaning patriarch he’s sometimes portrayed as. Described as modest, well-mannered and popular, he’s the opposite in temperament to his volatile, irascible father, Larry – who bankrolled Skydance’s takeover, and last month briefly became the world’s richest man thanks to the soaring share price of his company, Oracle. But he has inherited the latter’s drive – credited in Hollywood for building Skydance, which he founded in 2010, into one of the industry’s strongest independents. “I don’t know his plan, but I would bet on that kid any day of the week,” former Paramount Pictures president Adam Goodman told The Los Angeles Times. He has “an institutional knowledge and appreciation for the studio’s history, and a real love of movies”.

Born in 1983, to Larry Ellison and his third wife Barbara Boothe, David grew up on a horse farm in the San Francisco Bay area and was an intern at Oracle during high school. He eventually enrolled at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, dropping out to act in a $60 million movie about World War I pilots, Flyboys, part-financed by his father, which spectacularly flopped.

There’s no question Ellison “was gifted a head start”, says Bloomberg. Not many young Hollywood wannabes get to raise $350 million from JPMorgan for a production company. But it’s what he did with the cash that counts. He got a taste of success right at the start with the release of the Coen brothers’ True Grit, which grossed more than $252 million globally, following that up with several other blockbusters.

Still, the huge Paramount deal takes things to a new level. To secure it, Ellison had to wrestle with the Redstone family and their shareholders – while trying to prevent Trump from derailing the deal. “The reward for his patience is a company in decade-long decline,” stuffed with ancient networks and a “withered” film studio.

David Ellison is gunning for Warner Bros

Less than two months after swallowing one ailing media giant, Ellison is now looking to take down a much bigger one. Nothing captures his ambition better than his interest in Warner Bros. If he wins the $50 billion giant, the combined behemoth would boast the largest share of the national TV advertising market, the biggest movie studio output and a pair of streaming services (Paramount+ and HBO Max) that together sell more US subscriptions than even Netflix, says The Economist. Add CNN to CBS – and throw in Larry Ellison’s interest in the US operations of TikTok – and the family will become a mighty force in both old and new media. The question is what they do with that power.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors (BSME) editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.