Who’s Really Going to Run Paramount?
The deal that is expected to install Skydance chief David Ellison as chairman, CEO and hopefully savior of Paramount Global is a labyrinth of entities, trusts and transactions. Also potentially complicated, assuming the deal closes sometime next year, is the question of control.
Skydance sources say 41-year-old David will select the board and run things entirely independent of his father, Larry Ellison, also known as the world’s fifth-richest man, worth an estimated $176 billion, per Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index tally on Sept. 18. But Larry, 80, will own the controlling shares. Having previously bestowed billions on David and his sister, Megan, Larry has now backed his son to the tune of $6 billion as David pursued his dream of running a legacy studio.
What role, if any, Larry will play at the new Paramount is not clear. But given his track record of significant MAGA activity, there is certain to be scrutiny — though probably not of the regulatory variety — as Paramount Global runs CBS News operations and 28 licensed television broadcast stations controlled by the Lawrence J. Ellison Revocable Trust. On the other hand, Larry’s son does not share his politics and has contributed to Democratic causes. A Skydance source tells The Hollywood Reporter that Larry will be busy running Oracle and scoffs at the idea that the tech mogul would have any involvement with Paramount.
But industry veterans don’t see a world in which Larry puts up billions without at minimum creating a mechanism that would enable him to act should David falter in his effort to revive the fading media company. “Knowing Larry Ellison, I doubt he ever relinquishes control,” says a prominent media figure. “Skydance may want to push that it’s independent, but there’s no way it will be.”
Columbia University law professor and corporate governance expert John Coffee says it’s likely “that the father does have latent power here, but doesn’t want to humiliate the son.” Another source who has worked with Larry says he will expect to be apprised of major expenditures and budgeting decisions, but won’t be heavily involved in the day-to-day. And even if things go awry, the Paramount adventure won’t force him to mortgage the 98 percent of the Hawaiian island, Lanai, that he owns. “David wanted to do it,” this person says, “and for Larry, this is a rounding error.”
Larry well knows that Hollywood is a great place to burn money. When David was a 23-year-old aspiring actor, his father backed him in making Flyboys, a $65 million picture starring David as a pilot. The movie grossed less than $18 million. By the time David founded Skydance in 2006 and his sister, Megan, started Annapurna in 2011, Larry already had not only made them billionaires but connected them with powerful advisers including Steve Jobs, David Geffen and attorney Skip Brittenham.
David and Larry Ellison at the BNP Paribas Open at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden on March 14, 2022 in Indian Wells, California.
Megan proved to be resistant to tutoring, and Larry intervened in 2018, when her Annapurna Pictures, after a promising start, began to go off the rails. “She blew over half a billion dollars,” says the source familiar with the situation. (A rep for Annapurna denies that claim.) And despite Larry’s intervention, Annapurna continues to face turmoil. The entire staff of its interactive division, about 25 employees, resigned Sept. 12 after Megan pulled out of talks to spin it off as an independent company.
When it comes to homegrown movies, David’s track record has been mixed: He stumbled with original Gemini Man and Terminator Genisys, part of an ambitious plan to revive the franchise, but found success selling movies, including The Tomorrow War and The Old Guard, to streamers. He has irked some Paramount executives by implying that Skydance made such movies as Top Gun: Maverick and the Mission: Impossible films. While Ellison did advocate for a Top Gun sequel, he was an investor in those films, which were Paramount properties. “Paramount fully managed the production in all its complexity,” says one former insider. Skydance switched its first-look deal from Paramount to Apple in January 2022 and made a short-lived pact there for animated films under the aegis of John Lasseter. After making one movie, Luck, the deal moved to Netflix, where a second project is in the works.
At this point, David has plenty of Hollywood experience, but a Paramount veteran points out that the studio is a fraction of the overall economics of the parent company. “How do you solve a problem like [the decline of] linear television, which is the problem all media companies are facing?” this person says. “That’s the issue they’re going to face, and that is not David’s strong suit. It’s also a problem for Bob Iger and David Zaslav. If a company as powerful as Disney has not been able to solve it — well, that’s where you can see Larry having some input at some point.” Skydance has said that former NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell will be president of the new Paramount Global and presumably will be expected to address those challenges.
David Ellison speaks with Tom Cruise as he attends the Royal Film Performance and UK Premiere of Top Gun: Maverick at Leicester Square on May 19, 2022 in London, England.
Notably, Shell has been a backer of Democratic candidates, including Kamala Harris in her 2020 run for president. In a filing with the FCC, which will review the proposed blending of Skydance and Paramount, the prospective new owner-operators were clearly playing to Democratic chairman Jessica Rosenworcel. The filing said the deal will bring fresh investments in “the legendary newsgathering and reporting efforts of the national CBS television network and the company’s … local stations” and pledged that CBS and the stations will continue to be “trusted sources of news.”
Certainly progressive groups will be watching closely to catch any possible right-wing turn, but a Skydance source says flatly, “Larry’s not going to set the editorial vision for CBS.”
Larry’s politics are no mystery. In 2020, he held a fundraiser for Donald Trump at his Rancho Mirage estate. Days after the 2020 election, he was on a call with a group that included Sean Hannity, Lindsey Graham and then-Trump attorney Jay Sekulow to discuss ways to contest the outcome. (It’s unclear whether all the participants were on the same page; Sekulow subsequently pulled back, while Hannity pushed conspiracy theories on the air for months.)
Later, Larry told Forbes that he would support any president who was currently holding the office — seemingly a backhanded acknowledgement that Joe Biden had won the election. But when it came to the 2022 midterms, Larry gave more than $20 million to a Super PAC that backed four election-denying Senate candidates, among them befuddled former football star Herschel Walker. In a Senate with a razor-thin Democratic majority, two of those contenders — Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Ted Budd of North Carolina — won their seats. More recently, Larry gave $30 million to Republican Sen. Tim Scott’s PAC and pushed Trump to pick Scott as his running mate.
David, on the other hand, gave $929,600 to the Biden Victory Fund in the first quarter of this year. Now a knowledgeable source says neither David nor Larry will make any further donations this election cycle.
While Larry might not be the most politically desirable benefactor of an entertainment company, analyst Rich Greenfield says that his tech capabilities may in fact lead to transformative change. And Larry’s checks do clear, giving the post-deal Paramount some breathing room. “The problem with most media companies is they don’t have the balance sheet or the capacity to build for the future,” Greenfield says. “I think having a 40-year-old CEO [41, but who’s counting?] backed by one of the world’s wealthiest men should enable them to think for decades ahead, instead of the next quarterly earnings call. The world is littered with failures. At least they have a shot.”
Alex Weprin contributed to this report.
This story appeared in the Sept. 19 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
