Neither of these deals have been realized. But I want to flag something on the horizon that is potentially a very big deal. Yesterday, the Wall the Street Journal broke the news that the White House has negotiated a purchase of TikTok by a consortium that includes Oracle, Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz. The deal hasn’t been finalized yet. And it’s a whole other issue that you have the White House organizing something like this. The key, for our purposes, is Oracle and the Ellison family. This potentially takes TikTok out of the hands (indirectly) of the Chinese government (though the details there remain to be seen) and places it into the hands of key allies of President Trump. Meanwhile Paramount and CBS are now owned by Skydance, under the nominal rule of David Ellison, son of Oracle kingpin Larry Ellison. And Skydance/Paramount is now making a bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN.
There are a bunch of details I’m skipping over here. These are all deals in process. They could fall through. Warner Bros. Discovery’s market cap is twice that of Paramount/Skydance. So that’s a merger more than an acquisition. For our purposes however those are minor points. The key is that in the pretty near future the Ellison family might control CBS, CNN and TikTok.
It still seems kind of bizarre that we are placing CNN and TikTok in the same conversation as critical news and information properties. But they are. They are both critical vectors in the modern news and information ecosystem.
Warner Bros. Discovery is itself in the midst of splitting into two companies; the hot shot streaming stuff and studios go into one, the legacy cable properties (including CNN) go into the other. More crassly, this is something like taking the weak passengers and crew, putting them all into one big life boat and shoving them away from the yacht. They’ve already done most of the division. They officially become two companies, I believe, next year. Paramount/Skydance has made clear though that they want the full package, the current company, pre-split. That could be for various reasons and they might even be economic. But CNN is part of the deal they want.
In theory the Paramount/Skydance eating of Warner Bros. Discovery might draw regulatory scrutiny. But who are we kidding? Trump actually likes antitrust scrutiny … for his enemies. But even if the new combined entity were compelled to divest itself of some properties, it’s impossible to imagine he would put any barriers in the way of one of his key allies taking control of CNN.
There are other issues with Warner Bros. Discovery’s debt load and other spreadsheet Wall Street stuff. But Larry Ellison is 81 years old and a few days ago was briefly the richest man in the world. His net worth is over $350 billion. The best way to view this is probably to see that the aging titan is focused on building his son the coolest train set there is before he moves on to the emeritus board chairmanship in the sky. He has more than enough money to deal with all the spreadsheet stuff and make the train set as cool as he wants.
Let’s make a tally. That would mean the Murdoch family (or really now Lachlan Murdoch) controlling Fox News, the Journal, the NY Post and its other properties. Twitter, Tiktok, CBS, CNN and more owned by Elon Musk and the Ellison family. The Washington Post owned by Jeff Bezos.