David Ellison closed a $110 billion merger on October 6 that made him chairman and CEO of the largest entertainment company on the planet. The deal combined Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery into a single entity. He named it Skydance — after his own production company.
One of the properties that came with the purchase: CNN.
The Ellison family and RedBird Capital Partners hold 100% of the voting shares in the new company. Not a majority. Not a controlling interest. All of it. The Ellison Trust provided a $45.7 billion equity commitment to make it happen, personally guaranteed by David's father — Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle and one of the wealthiest men alive. Bank of America, Citi, and Apollo backed another $57.5 billion in debt financing. Paramount issued $47 billion in new Class B shares at $16.02 per share, purchased by the Ellison family and RedBird's Gerry Cardinale.
Larry Ellison is a close ally of President Trump. David Ellison attended a Trump White House state dinner for the Chinese president this year — a dinner, Variety reported, from which CNN and MSNBC reporters were barred. The network that couldn't get into the building is now owned by the man who was sitting at the table.
The combined company controls CNN, CBS, HBO, Paramount+, HBO Max, MTV, TBS, Comedy Central, and Food Network, among others. Two news networks — CNN and CBS News — now answer to the same boardroom. CNN anchor Anderson Cooper sat down with Ellison after the deal closed for a town hall about the network's future, which is the kind of meeting that doesn't happen when the new owner is irrelevant to your operation.
Ellison told the town hall audience, "We believe in editorial independence, and we will never interfere." That's the standard line from every new media owner, and maybe he means it. But editorial independence at CNN over the past decade meant calling half the country deplorable, running chyrons that read like DNC press releases, and spending four years trying to convince America that Trump was a Russian asset. If that's what independence produced, a little interference might be an improvement.
Cardinale, who runs RedBird Capital, has been investing in media and entertainment for 35 years and began working with Ellison seven years ago. This wasn't an impulse buy. The deal structure — with the family holding every voting share and outside investors carrying only economic interest — means CNN's editorial direction ultimately runs through people who dine at the White House, not people who protest outside it.
The network that built its brand on resistance now operates inside an empire built by a family the resistance was resisting. Jim Acosta is gone. Brian Stelter is gone. The prime-time lineup that once functioned as a nightly impeachment rally has been gutted and rebuilt. And the man signing the checks just came from a state dinner where CNN's own reporters weren't allowed through the door.
CNN spent years telling its audience that Trump's allies were a threat to the free press. The Ellison family's $45.7 billion says otherwise. They didn't shut CNN down. They bought it.
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