Elon Musk has reportedly put $1 billion into Skydance. On October 6, Skydance completed its roughly $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, and Warner Bros. Discovery owns CNN.
So the man who bought Twitter and turned it into the most free-speech-friendly major platform in the world now has money in the company that owns the network that spent years treating him as a menace.
Skydance is run by David Ellison, son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. The elder Ellison is one of Musk's closest business allies. He sat on Tesla's board, put $1 billion into Musk's purchase of Twitter in 2022, and personally guaranteed more than $40 billion in financing to help his son land Warner Bros. Discovery.
The deal put CNN and CBS News under the same roof as HBO, Warner Bros., Paramount, and TNT Sports. It also left the combined company carrying about $87 billion in debt, and Musk's money reportedly came in alongside other investors to help shore it up.
CNN's journalists didn't want any of this. When it became clear in February that Ellison would win the bidding war, CNN staffers described the mood as "shaken" and "depressing." Much of the newsroom had been rooting for Netflix.
"No one wants to work for the Ellisons," one CNN on-air journalist said. Pointing to the changes Ellison made at CBS News, where he brought in Bari Weiss to shake up the newsroom, the journalist added: "if Bari is going to be running CNN, expect people to leave."
The left outside the building took it even harder. Former CNN correspondent Jim Acosta announced that "America now has state-compromised media." Ron Filipkowski of the left-wing MeidasTouch network predicted: "This will be the end of CNN."
That was before Elon Musk showed up.
Musk is the man CNN's anchors and commentators have spent years warning viewers about. He's the owner of the platform they love to hate, the former head of the Department of Government Efficiency, and the Republican Party's biggest donor. Just this week, Democrats in Congress made clear they plan to investigate him if they win the majority in November.
Now CNN's chairman and CEO, Mark Thompson, runs a newsroom whose parent company has a billion dollars of Musk's money in it.
A stake in the parent company doesn't make Musk CNN's boss. Thompson still runs the network, and a court-approved settlement with California's attorney general requires an editorial independence board for CNN and CBS News. But nobody at CNN needs Musk to touch a single story for the irony to sting. The network that treated his purchase of Twitter as a crisis for journalism now operates inside a company he's helping to fund.
The money pressure is real, too. Skydance has promised at least $6 billion a year in cost savings within three years. With that much debt, every division will have to justify its budget, and CNN, after years of falling ratings and rounds of layoffs, will be no exception. The cost-cutting will come from a company whose investors now include the man CNN's hosts blame for wrecking the information ecosystem.
Musk isn't the only investor. Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs' widow and a major Democratic donor, sits on Skydance's board and reportedly invested alongside him. But you won't hear CNN's audience complaining about her. The only name that makes them uncomfortable is Musk's.
Conservative commentator Benny Johnson put it simply: "How many CNN employees will quit after this?"
Neither Musk nor Skydance has commented on the reported investment. Skydance's stock jumped about 6% when the news broke, then gave back the gains.
When Musk bought Twitter, his critics warned that one man shouldn't have that much influence over the national conversation. Now a billion dollars of his money is helping fund the company that signs CNN's paychecks.
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