The Hollywood Reporter (2/27/26) reported Paramount‘s disclosure that funding for its WBD takeover “may include other strategic and financial partners” who go unnamed. The Reporter noted that “previous bids included funding from Middle East sovereign wealth funds, Tencent and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners.”
The ultra-wealthy have long leveraged their capital to build sprawling media empires that narrow our public range of debate (FAIR.org, 6/1/87). But Paramount Skydance‘s winning bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) marks a major milestone in media monopolization that, if successful, will further expand Trump-allied tech moguls Larry and David Ellison’s burgeoning power over US news and entertainment media.
Even before a winner was announced, the bidding war among Paramount, Netflix and Comcast to take over WBD had attracted intense scrutiny, as the acquisition would not only confer lucrative franchises and a huge advantage in the streaming wars, but also control of major media outlets, including CNN, consolidating a greater swath of the media ecosystem under a single owner.
The fallout of the deal was destined to enhance the power of an already-sizable media behemoth, no matter which corporate giant won. On February 27, 2026, after a series of hostile takeover bids by Paramount that disrupted what seemed to be a done deal between Netflix and WBD, Netflix abruptly pulled out of the struggle for ownership, stating that it would not be matching Paramount’s higher offer.
The current Paramount offer is valued at $31 per share and, including WBD’s debt load, amounts to a grand total of roughly $111 billion.
Father-and-son moguls
Alex Shephard (New Republic, 10/27/25): “The administration will use its antitrust power to ensure that it gets the owner of Warner Bros. that it wants: the Ellison family.”
Steering this deal, and Paramount’s rapid expansion, are Larry and David Ellison, father-and-son moguls who, in just a single year, have parlayed their tech fortune into a colossal media empire. Larry Ellison, billionaire co-founder of Oracle, has bankrolled Paramount’s ballooning growth, which is overseen by his son David. The pair are notoriously close to Donald Trump, and have already weaponized their newfound media control to shift public discourse to the right (FAIR.org, 9/9/25, 9/19/25, 10/9/25, 11/6/25).
In August 2025, the Ellisons’ Skydance Media acquired Paramount, owner of CBS, and spearheaded a blatant ideological overhaul of the news network (FAIR.org, 7/24/25). This MAGA-friendly transformation has been aided by Ellison-appointed editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, who had previously made a name for herself as an “anti-woke” crusader and founder of the right-wing media company Free Press. Weiss has been at the forefront of such decisions as canceling the Late Show With Stephen Colbert, pulling a 60 Minutes episode that criticized the Trump administration’s mistreatment of Venezuelan migrants, and promoting Tony Dokoupil to primetime anchor, where he promptly gave War Secretary Pete Hegseth an extended and uncritical platform.
Less than six months after the closure of the Paramount deal, in January 2026, Larry Ellison finalized a deal with TikTok, which sold 80% of its US operations to an investor consortium that includes Oracle, and left Ellison with a majority stake in TikTok’s US operations.
Since then, a number of changes have been implemented that reek of censorship and surveillance. For one, TikTok immediately altered its privacy policy to permit more extensive data collection, including tracking user location.
There have also been accusations of content suppression. This became a prominent conversation after the murder of Alex Pretti, as many users reported that they were unable to upload anti-ICE posts and that, if uploaded, their content was receiving unusually low engagement. Researchers found there was a site-wide outage at the time, but they pointed out that because TikTok isn’t transparent with its data or its algorithm, there’s no way to confirm it’s not shadowbanning content (NPR, 2/4/26)
Now, on the precipice of acquiring WBD, with a targeted completion date of September 30, 2026, the Ellisons are slated to have massively expanded their entertainment, media and tech empire in barely over a year. If the deal moves forward, the family would gain control of a vast portfolio spanning legacy media and Big Tech—including film, news, television, sports and social media—granting them substantial influence over how the world is seen and understood.
Shuffling the media oligarchy
In FAIR’s recent online news ownership study (2/3/26), WBD took the third spot and Paramount/Skydance the 16th. By taking over WBD, the Ellisons would vault into third, just behind Rupert Murdoch’s dynasty.
What does this look like in terms of numbers? According to Pew, 37% of adults in the US use TikTok. Pew notes that “just over half of US adults who use TikTok (55%) say they regularly get news there. That works out to 20% of all US adults,” or about 54 million people. Given TikTok’s expanding reach as a news source, the Ellisons’ ownership of the platform is especially significant.
When factoring in CBS and the additional audience that would accompany an acquisition of CNN, the scope of Ellison-owned media widens even more. As FAIR noted in a recent study (2/3/26), the digital reach alone of these networks is considerable—from December 2024 to November 2025, CBS and CNN attracted 905 million and 4 billion views, respectively. If we use these numbers to project a future in which the Ellisons control CNN, their annual online news view count would be around 5 billion.
The actual broadcast and cable TV viewership of CBS and CNN adds relatively little to the Ellisons’ reach: In a recent week in March, CNN averaged 751,000 total primetime viewers, while the CBS Evening News typically had an audience of 4.3 million in the first quarter of 2026.
While the Ellisons’ rapidly consolidating media dynasty is not unprecedented, these developments have reconfigured the media oligarchy, partially displacing established players and amassing holdings that extend beyond traditional cable and print news into digital and technology media.
Revisiting FAIR’s ranking of digital media owners by site traffic, an Ellison acquisition of WBD would catapult them to the No. 3 spot, driven by CNN’s more than 4 billion annual visits, placing them just behind the No. 1 Ochs-Sulzberger family of the New York Times and the No. 2 Murdoch family.
However, unlike with the Ochs-Sulzbergers, the Ellison media empire would also translate to a strong broadcast and cable news presence, as CNN is regarded as one of the “Big Three” cable news channels, generally trailing only Fox News and Comcast’s MS NOW (formerly MSNBC).
And, although the Murdochs wield considerable power in cable, digital and print news, the Ellison portfolio expands into the social media realm as well. This is notable considering the ever-increasing number of Americans that rely on social media for news. According to Pew, 53% of US adults get news from social media “sometimes” or “often.” Facebook and YouTube are the most popular sites for news, while 20% get news “regularly” from Instagram and TikTok.
While the Ellisons do not lead in social media news ownership—that distinction belongs to Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) and Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google (which owns YouTube)—their media empire, like the Murdochs’, ranks prominently across multiple platforms.
Corrupted regulation
The Wall Street Journal (12/8/25) reported that “David Ellison offered assurances to Trump administration officials that if he bought Warner, he’d make sweeping changes to CNN…. Trump has told people close to him that he wants new ownership of CNN as well as changes to CNN programming.”
The Paramount/WBD deal has been unanimously approved by the boards of both companies. The next phase is a WBD shareholders vote, which is scheduled to take place on April 23, 2026, and is expected to move forward without complications.
Reuters (2/27/26) reports that approval in the EU is not anticipated to pose a significant hurdle, given that a combined Paramount/WBD entity would hold less than a 20% market share across European markets.
In the US, the merger would require clearance from both the Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which are both controlled by Trump appointees. The anti–public interest antics of FCC chair Brendan Carr are already well-documented by FAIR (2/26/25, 4/2/26; CounterSpin, 4/4/25), and newly appointed Attorney General Todd Blanche appears to have been promoted solely for his unwavering deference to Trump.
DoJ official Omeed Assefi, himself a Trump appointee, has insisted that the transaction would “absolutely not” be fast-tracked for political reasons. Yet this claim has been loudly contradicted by statements from Trump’s inner circle. For instance, Hegseth recently said, “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network [CNN], the better.”
A lawsuit filed against Paramount and assorted executives by a former consultant alleges that the elder Ellison was told by Trump, “Larry, it looks like Netflix is gonna get Warner Bros., but if you really really want it, Larry, I’ll make sure you get it” (Hollywood Reporter, 3/17/26).
Even if Trump has not explicitly vocalized his preference for an Ellison-owned CNN, it is clear that his personal preference effectively amounts to federal regulatory approval. Put simply, when it comes to antitrust matters, or virtually anything regulatory, pandering to Trump is a prerequisite.
And the Ellisons are not shy about pandering: In early December 2025, while the Netflix deal was still in play, David Ellison met with Trump and DoJ officials in Washington, DC, where he publicly pitched that, if Paramount acquired WBD, he would implement “sweeping changes” at CNN.
As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo (12/8/25) observed, shady backdoor dealing and political corruption form the scaffolding of the media oligarchy, a dynamic that reaches new extremes under the Trump regime:
Trump has refashioned antitrust oversight to be little more than a personal veto for the Trump family. Friends can do mergers; foes can’t. Indeed, the indifferent and uncommitted can’t either. You need to get right with the Trump family.
Hope from the states
David Dayen (American Prospect, 2/27/26): “A lifeline exists outside of Trump’s grasp to rethink this looming disaster…. But the state AGs are going to have to act fast.”
While it seems unlikely that federal officials with the power to intervene will do so, there is some cause for optimism at the state level. State governments, particularly state attorneys general, have both the authority and a track record of blocking mergers, even those approved by federal agencies.
Currently leading the charge is California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who, immediately following the news of a potential Paramount/WBD deal, posted on X (2/26/26) that his office would vigorously investigate the merger. California has taken center stage in this fight, due to the outsized impact that such a deal would have on the state’s television and film workforce.
Recent history underscores the validity of these concerns. Just last year, mass layoffs followed the Ellisons’ Skydance/Paramount merger, demonstrating the damage that monopolistic practices wreak on workers.
How effective this resistance will be against the sheer capital and political forces driving the Paramount/WBD deal remains uncertain. As David Dayen explains in the American Prospect (2/27/26), states are well aware of the path forward, and there is historical precedence for them to invoke the Clayton Act to challenge the merger. However, he emphasizes the need to act quickly, noting that states “are in a race against Paramount’s savvy consultants, who are trying to speedrun the deal in a matter of weeks.”
ACTION ALERT: The progressive media policy group Free Press has a petition encouraging state attorneys general to block Paramount*‘s takeover of* WBD*.*
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