Here is a sentence that would have sounded deranged three years ago: The son of an Oracle billionaire who produces Mission Impossible movies is about to own both CBS News and CNN, with financing from Saudi Arabia, the personal blessing of the President of the United States and a track record that already includes canceling Stephen Colbert and installing a new editorial chief who asks veteran correspondents why America thinks they’re biased.
That sentence is now a business filing away from becoming reality.
Netflix pulled out of the Warner Bros. Discovery bidding war on Thursday, declining to match Paramount Skydance’s escalating $111 billion offer. The streaming giant’s co-CEOs called the deal “no longer financially attractive.” Fair enough. But what Netflix left behind when it walked out the door is a clear runway for David Ellison to assemble the largest concentration of American news and entertainment assets under a single politically connected owner since… well, since ever.
Follow the Handshakes
The timeline tells you everything the press releases won’t.
On Tuesday night, David Ellison showed up to President Trump’s State of the Union address as the personal guest of Senator Lindsey Graham. They posed for a photo. Thumbs up. The universal signal of the Trump inner circle.
On Wednesday, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos scrambled to the White House for meetings with administration officials. Not with Trump, officials were careful to clarify. Just staff. A Netflix spokesperson insisted the visit had been planned weeks in advance. Nobody believed the timing was coincidental.
On Thursday morning, WBD CEO David Zaslav reported quarterly earnings and noted the bidding war had produced “eight price increases” and a 63% jump in value from the first offer. Hours later, the WBD board declared Paramount’s bid “superior.” Hours after that, Netflix folded.
David Ellison had already visited Trump privately at the White House earlier this month. Trump, who told reporters in December that it was “imperative” CNN be sold and that he’d be “involved in that decision,” later claimed with a straight face that he “hasn’t been involved.”
Right.
The CBS Dress Rehearsal
Anyone wondering what Ellison ownership means for CNN only needs to look at what has already happened to CBS. It’s not speculation. It’s documented.
When Paramount Skydance took control of CBS, Ellison installed Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News. Weiss, founder of The Free Press, built her brand on criticizing mainstream media as reflexively liberal. Her arrival at CBS was followed by a series of editorial decisions that critics called interference and supporters called correction.
She asked veteran CBS correspondents, some with decades of experience in war zones and Washington bureaus, why the country perceives them as biased. A 60 Minutes segment critical of the Trump administration’s deportation practices was abruptly shelved before eventually airing. Colbert’s Late Show, one of the most watched and most Trump-critical programs on network television, was canceled.
Then came February 2026. Paramount attempted to block a Colbert interview with James Talarico, a Texas Democratic Senate candidate. The censorship backfired catastrophically when the interview racked up millions of views on YouTube, arguably boosting Talarico’s primary chances more than the original CBS broadcast ever would have.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr responded to all of this by publicly praising CBS for returning to “more fact-based, unbiased reporting.” A sitting FCC chairman applauding the editorial direction of a network whose owner is simultaneously negotiating a $111 billion deal that requires regulatory approval. Let that sink in.
CNN’s 45 Year Independence Is On the Clock
Ted Turner launched CNN in 1980 on the radical premise that news happens around the clock and people will watch it. That premise built a global news organization with bureaus on six continents, correspondents who live in the cities they cover and a brand recognized in more than 200 countries.
Under the Netflix deal, CNN was going to be spun off into a separate company. Netflix wanted Warner’s studio and HBO. It explicitly did not want CNN. That spinoff would have left CNN’s newsroom intact and operationally independent, run by CEO Mark Thompson and WBD’s chief financial officer Gunnar Wiedenfels.
That escape hatch just closed.
Paramount wants CNN. Ellison has said so from the start. A combined company would put CBS News and CNN under the same ownership structure, with the logical outcome being some form of merged news-gathering operation. Whether Bari Weiss would take on a role in CNN’s editorial leadership remains unclear. But the pattern is set, and CNN journalists know it. Thompson’s internal memo urging staff not to “jump to conclusions about the future” reads less like reassurance and more like a man buying time.
Anderson Cooper apparently read the room. After nearly two decades as a 60 Minutes correspondent alongside his CNN anchoring duties, Cooper recently declined to renew his CBS deal. The irony: if Paramount closes the WBD acquisition, Cooper’s CNN contract puts him right back under Ellison’s umbrella anyway.
The Money Is Staggering and Possibly Delusional
Put aside the politics for a moment and look at the deal itself.
Paramount is offering $31 per share, valuing Warner Bros. Discovery at roughly $111 billion including debt. WBD already carries approximately $40 billion in debt from the catastrophic Discovery-WarnerMedia merger, a deal that destroyed shareholder value so thoroughly it became a business school cautionary tale before the ink was dry. Paramount is promising $6 billion in “synergies and cost savings,” which is corporate speak for mass layoffs across every division.
The financing structure should raise eyebrows on its own. Larry Ellison is personally guaranteeing a substantial portion of the deal. Sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi are providing additional backing. To win the bidding war, Paramount sweetened terms with a $7 billion regulatory termination fee if the deal gets blocked and agreed to cover the $2.8 billion breakup fee WBD owes Netflix for walking away from their agreement.
The deal values WBD at nearly 13 times its estimated core earnings. Cable television, which generates the profit margins that make media conglomerates work, is hemorrhaging subscribers with no floor in sight. Content costs keep rising. The streaming wars have proven that most platforms lose money. And Paramount is betting it can integrate two massive, culturally distinct companies while servicing a mountain of combined debt.
Analysts at Emarketer characterized the deal as being driven more by ego than business logic. Netflix’s stock surged on the news it was walking away, which tells you everything about what Wall Street thinks of the buyer’s strategy.
What One Family Will Own
If this deal closes, here is the Ellison media footprint: CBS. CNN. HBO. Warner Bros. Pictures. Paramount Pictures. Paramount+. HBO Max. Discovery Channel. TBS. TNT. The CW. Showtime. BET. MTV. Comedy Central. Nickelodeon. A stake in TikTok’s U.S. operations. The intellectual property behind Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, DC Comics, the Wizarding World, Star Trek, Mission Impossible, Top Gun, Transformers and SpongeBob SquarePants.
Larry Ellison’s Oracle, meanwhile, runs cloud infrastructure for the federal government and major corporations. The family’s reach would span from the backend of American digital life to the front end of American cultural life.
Senator Elizabeth Warren called it an “antitrust disaster.” Conservative commentator Jeffrey Blehar, writing in National Review, said he was shaken by the “seemingly open corruption” and how little anyone seems to care. That a progressive senator and a conservative commentator arrived at the same conclusion should be the headline of this entire saga.
The Last Line of Defense Might Be a Republican AG in Montana
The Trump Justice Department is not going to block this deal. Nobody serious believes otherwise. Paramount’s $7 billion regulatory termination fee is less a financial commitment and more a signal: they know they have friends in Washington.
But federal regulators are not the only ones with jurisdiction. State attorneys general can challenge mergers on antitrust grounds, and some are already positioning to do exactly that. Montana AG Austin Knudsen, a Republican, published an op-ed opposing media consolidation in terms that could apply equally to the Paramount deal. He argued that Hollywood’s creative strength was built on competition between studios, not concentration under a single corporate owner.
Whether red-state AGs will have the political will to challenge a Trump-aligned deal is the open question. But it may be the only institutional check left.
This Is Not Normal
Media companies have always had owners. Owners have always had politics. That is not new.
What is new is the speed, the scale and the shamelessness. A sitting president publicly demanding a news network be sold. That network’s potential buyer attending the president’s address to Congress as an honored guest. A regulatory apparatus run by political appointees who publicly praise the buyer’s editorial choices at existing properties. Foreign sovereign wealth financing a deal that reshapes the American information landscape. And a financial structure so aggressive that it suggests the point was never profit.
The point is control.
WBD’s board still has to formally adopt the merger agreement. Shareholders from both companies have to approve it. Regulators, state and federal, will review it for months. There are a hundred ways this deal could still fall apart, from antitrust challenges to debt market wobbles to the sheer operational nightmare of combining two companies that have each been through traumatic mergers in the last five years.
But Netflix is out. The alternative bidder is gone. And the path from here runs straight through the Ellison family’s front door.
Forty-five years ago, Ted Turner bet that Americans wanted news around the clock. He was right, and CNN became a global institution. Now that institution’s independence depends on whether a billionaire’s son, his father’s fortune and a handful of sovereign wealth funds can clear a few remaining regulatory hurdles that the president of the United States has every incentive to wave through.
If that doesn’t alarm you, you’re not paying attention.