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The billionaire tech heir trying to buy the movie industry — on his father’s dime
00:27:09
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- [00:04]
A
This is in conversation from Apple News. I'm Shemitah Basu. Today, how one of the world's wealthiest families is changing Hollywood. Right now, some of the most valuable movies and TV shows ever made are at the center of an ownership battle. Two companies, Paramount, Skydance and Netflix, are fighting for control of Warner Bros. Discovery, the studio that owns hbo, cnn, and a trove of classic films. It's just the latest sign that consolidations are reshaping Hollywood, changing what we watch, how we watch it and how much we pay.
- [00:47]
B
They obviously, at a basic level, stand to gain one of the most iconic companies in Hollywood history.
- [00:52]
A
That's Reeves Wideman, a features writer for New York Magazine. He recently profiled David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount Skyd and one of the key players in this fight for a huge piece of the media landscape. David is also the son of Larry Ellison, co founder and longtime CEO of the tech company Oracle and one of the richest people in the world.
- [01:14]
B
There is no way to separate David Ellison's rise in Hollywood from his father and the impact his father has had on his career, funding his efforts in Hollywood basically throughout the past 20 years, from Skydance, the company he ran, and more recently to buying Paramount and now trying to buy Warner Bros. Reeves didn't.
- [01:34]
A
Speak directly with David or Larry for this piece, but he did talk to people who know them and who say despite having a mixed track record, David's passion for the industry is genuine.
- [01:45]
B
He loves movies. He loves the movie business. He wants it to be successful. He wants to build a sustainable company that becomes a real player in Hollywood after years of kind of decline.
- [01:57]
A
So I sat down with Reeves to understand who the Ellisons really are, what they want and what their growing power could mean for the future of the media and all of us watching at home. Let's start with Larry's story because he's one of those people who is one of the wealthiest in the world, and yet I think a lot of people don't actually know very much about him. He's managed to kind of fly under the radar. What's Larry's story? Who is he?
- [02:26]
B
Larry has a really interesting background. He was born on the Lower east side in New York City, given up for adoption by his mother. Never met his father. Moved to Chicago with his adopted family when he was less than a year old. Larry likes to describe his childhood as kind of rough in some ways. His adopted father would apparently say to Larry, pretty regularly as a kid, you know, you're never going to amount to anything. You're no good And Larry, as he built Oracle, the tech company he founded, and as that company grew and grew, he would tell this story over and over again. And the way he described it was that he had all of the disadvantages necessary for success. And what he meant by that is he had all of the innate motivation to prove himself. He didn't grow up wealthy, so he was going out there to build his wealth, to build his reputation, to prove himself to his father. And what's interesting about Larry is he is in fact, one of the most colorful people in all of Silicon Valley. One of his best friends was Steve Jobs. And Steve described Larry as sort of the poster child for outrageous CEO. He spends money very lavishly on real estate, on giant yachts. He owns an entire Hawaiian island. But the reason he's kind of skated by is Oracle, the company he founded, is without question the most boring tech company out there. It is not a consumer facing company like Google or Facebook or even Netflix, like the companies that we're very familiar with. But Oracle is everywhere. Oracle databases are the backing for basically every large organization in the world. So they've served this sort of crucial role in the rise of the Internet, which is one of the reasons Larry has built his wealth. But he hasn't quite gotten the same level of scrutiny just because the company is so different than some of the other tech giants that have grown over the years.
- [04:15]
A
That's fascinating. I was reading a bit about him and he was described in some places as a centi billionaire, which was actually not a word that I knew that we had invented yet in English. But I guess there's a few people now that, yeah, it applies to some people in the world now, and he's one of very few who it does apply to, in fact. And now David is Larry's son by his third wife, with whom he had a short marriage. They also had a daughter, Megan, who you write about in the piece as also having ambitions in Hollywood and having her own career. But what was David's upbringing like? What was his childhood like with Larry as a father?
- [04:51]
B
So, yes, David was the son of Larry's third wife, Barbara. Barbara Booth. And Larry and Barbara got divorced, I believe, when right around David's third birthday. His sister Megan had just been bor. Larry wasn't really around that much when David was a kid. Larry sort of admits to that. Barbara has talked about it. David has talked about it. He was really busy building Oracle. He was not a natural father in certain ways, and, you know, would spend the weekends with the kids. He wasn't totally absent, but would often get pulled away and wasn't a sort of daily presence in their lives. That sort of changed when David became a teenager in a couple of ways. David really wanted to learn how to fly. He had always had this ambition as a kid. And when he turned 13, he and Larry started taking flying lessons together. And it's sort of again, part of the David Ellison sort of origin story is he connected with his father over this. David, to his credit, actually became one of the best aerobatic flyers, stunt pilots in the country. He would go to these air shows where he's doing barrel rolls and flying at like 300 miles an hour, you know, 15ft off the ground. And so, you know, that was kind of a way in which they connected. The side of David that loves movies actually came from his mom. He says they watched movies all the time. Apparently they had a collect of, David has said, 3,000 VHS videotapes. When he was growing up in the 80s and 90s, they'd go to the movies every weekend. And in one other way, he got a lot from his mother, which is everyone describes David as incredibly nice, which I don't know if anyone has ever said that about Larry Ellison, who is kind of your classic bombastic, arrogant, hard charging executive. David seems to have gotten some sense of humility and kindness and almost gentleness as people talk about him from his mom. And Larry and others have sort of talked about that as much, which is.
- [06:42]
A
Interesting, which has served him differently, but seemingly well as he has risen through the ranks, right?
- [06:48]
B
Yeah, that's right. And I've written about lots of powerful people, business owners, about whom people have plenty of nasty things to say, Partly based on the way that those kind of entrepreneurs sometimes tend to treat their underlings. And that's not the case with David. By and large, by people he works with in Hollywood, they all say it's sort of two sides. On the one hand, David would not be where he is if his father was not Larry Ellison, if he didn't have the financial backing from his father. At the same time, he has worked hard to try to prove his place and has not, you know, just been a lazy rich kid taking his dad's money and going to Hollywood parties.
- [07:25]
A
Well, let's talk about David's entry into Hollywood. You tell this story in your piece where he actually had acting ambitions at first and he was cast in this movie called Flyboys, and it came out in 2006. It's a movie that most people will not have heard of because it totally Bombed at the box office. Can you tell us that story?
- [07:45]
B
Yeah. So Flyboys was a World War I fighter pilot movie. And the people who were making it had struggled to get financing. They had made big Hollywood movies before, but for one reason or another, they were struggling to get this movie off the ground. And then one of the people involved in the film found out David Ellison was at USC film school, was trying to break into Hollywood. He really loved to fly. He flew planes. And most importantly, his father was Larry Ellison. And Larry agreed to fund a lot of the budget of this movie. It was a $60 million movie. And lo and behold, David got a role in the movie. He played one of the fighter pilots alongside James Franco. And as you mentioned, the movie wasn't very good and it didn't do very well at the box office. And this was incredibly stressful to David Ellison, who at the time, I think, was 23 years old. So much so that that weekend he ended up checking into the hospital, his heart had started beating out of rhythm. He had become so stressed, even sort of depressed, as he put it, about the weekend, that he needed to seek medical attention.
- [08:50]
A
What was Larry's reaction?
- [08:52]
B
Larry had an interesting reaction. I talked to one of the producers on the film who told me a story about kind of remembering Larry calling him actually on the way. This producer was driving to the hospital, literally in Los Angeles to check on David. He gets a phone call. Larry Ellison's name pops up on his phone. Obviously, the box office results were in. This guy was sort of expecting, you know, Larry to be incredibly upset about losing millions, maybe tens of millions of dollars. It turns out, according to the producer, you know, Larry wasn't all that upset. A few million dollars isn't that much when you have tens of billions. And said that he was most concerned about his son. And he wanted to make sure that the producer relayed that Larry was, in fact, very proud of his son, David, even though the film had not worked out.
- [09:36]
A
You write that once David realized maybe acting wasn't his way into a Hollywood career, he this production company called Skydance. This was in 2010. Yeah. And looking at his track record at Skydance tells us about the kinds of films that he likes to make. And I actually chuckled a little bit. You had spoken to a former Skydance executive who described David Ellison's taste in movies as normie, which is just to say he likes making sequels and he likes making big budget blow ups. So tell me a little bit more about the kinds of movies that David likes to make and his time Running Skydance.
- [10:15]
B
Skydance was largely a co financer of projects. They actually had this deal with paramount way back 15 years ago, long before David bought the company where Paramount wanted to make a new Mission Impossible movie or a Star Trek movie. And David has always loved big blockbusters. He talks sort of over and over as a kid about watching the Star wars movies over and over again. He loves the Terminator movies. In fact, one of the first movies that he sort of produced on his own was a sequel to Terminator in 2015. So he is always kind of spectacle, big budget, big stars, big visual effects, big action scenes. Those are the kinds of movies he wants to make. Obviously some of those movies are great and we can all love them. Some of them are pretty bad. And it's here that sort of the record for David and for Skydance is not great. You know, they have had this long standing relationship with Tom Cruise, the Mission Impossible movies, Jack Reacher movies, Top Maverick, Top Gun, Maverick, one of the most successful movies critically and commercially in a long time. At the same time, David got a little bit frustrated as he was building Skydance. He had this deal with Paramount to make movies, but a lot of times the studio was rejecting the original ideas that Skydance was bringing. And eventually he landed on a sort of new model in Hollywood which was making movies for streaming services. And it was a different sort of model where these companies would say, yes, here's a 100, $125 million budget. And rather than Skydance needing to make a movie that then did really well at the box office, for them to make any money, the streaming service would just say, we'll cover the budget and here's 10, 20, $25 million that you get no matter how good the movie is, no matter how many people watch it. And so over a series of years, Skydance produced a number of movies with huge movie stars, most of very good, some are quite bad. And I'm guessing that most people listening to this podcast wouldn't have even heard of a lot of them. And it certainly brings has brought into question whether he has the taste, has the chops to make great movies. Which at the end of the day, when you're running a movie studio, that's the thing you have to do above all else.
- [12:30]
A
So Last year, in 2025, David Ellison and Skydance buy Paramount for $8 billion. Talk to me about this Paramount deal and how that came about. Like what made David want to go after Paramount, what was appealing to him about that? And what, if anything, did his dad have to do with it.
- [12:51]
B
So David had talked early on in his career in Hollywood about wanting to own a movie studio one day. And so this was kind of an ambition of his and kind of one of these things that, you know, he had been dreaming of doing one day. Paramount had struggled among kind of the major Hollywood studios. There had been a lot of mismanagement. It had a ton of debt. And so David was able to kind of swoop in and in some ways do something that, you know, any kid who loves to make movies, who has the money to buy a movie studio would want to do. There's another side of it, which is a lot of people have sort of, you know, looked at Skydance, looked at the business and what we know about the business and the changing economics in Hollywood and wondered if almost buying Paramount was sort of existential for Skydance. The company, as we talked about, had made these streaming movies. They were getting paid handsomely for it, but not all those movies were working, and the streaming services were cutting back on. On their budgets. So, you know, Tom Cruise was not gonna make Mission Impossible movies forever. He said, he's done. So it wasn't clear what the future looked like for Skydance. So in a certain respect, there was one way in which this was kind of the move that David had to make and certainly wanted to make for Larry. Larry was the money. You know, Larry was the one who backed the deal. He funded. I think the deal ended up being about $8 billion. Larry funded 6 billion of that. I think a lot of it was, you know, this is my son. This is what he wants to do. You know, this is a pretty good deal. We get to buy a movie studio that not that long ago was worth $23 billion. Now it's worth 8. Let's buy this, and let's try. Try to build something with it. Larry had never really had expressed much interest in Hollywood. There's a funny story I dug up where he. Back in the 90s, he was best friends with Steve Jobs. And Jobs at the time kept showing him these different iterations of this movie he was working on called Toy Story. And Larry was like, oh, my gosh, if Steve shows me one more version of this movie, I'm gonna. You know, I'm gonna jump off. So he never was interested in movies and making movies the way David was, but I think he saw this as an opportunity and an opportunity to build something even bigger with his son.
- [14:54]
A
There's also the relationship between Larry Ellison and Donald Trump and the current White House. I mean, can you talk A little bit about that. What do we know about their relationship? They've been described as close. But again, Larry Ellison is just one of those people that has managed to stay out of headlines for the most part.
- [15:14]
B
Yeah, Larry has a sort of interesting political history. He grew up a Democrat. He has talked often about how Bill Clinton was his favorite politician. He was one of the biggest funders of Bill Clinton's first campaign, sort of in the 2000s into the 2010s. He seems as if he sort of quietly was a more moderate Republican, did not back Donald Trump in 2016. He was a huge backer of Marco Rubio's campaign and also didn't back him in 2024. He spent a lot of money trying to get Scott to be the Republican nominee at the same time. And I think ultimately the way to think about Larry's what he cares about in terms of politics. And I think it goes for David as well, who largely has a history of donating to Democrats is they're self interested. And, you know, when Trump was in power, obviously Larry, sort of a lot of the way he views the world sort of leans Republican and he was willing to embrace that in 2020. He did get on a phone call with a few advisors, Trump advisors, including Lindsey Graham and Sean Hannity, about the election and the election results and if there was any way to potentially overturn it. And so he clearly has in certain ways, sort of gotten in Trump's circle. We've seen him more clearly there over the past year and a half or so. He's appeared at the White House a couple times. In both cases, they were in situations that were very beneficial to Oracle. One was talking about AI investment, and Oracle's business is heavily predicated on being kind of a backbone for the growth of AI. And the other was about the TikTok deal, which has been long gestating in which Oracle is now an owner in the American version of TikTok. There was the long saga over the 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris in 2024 where Trump sued 60 Minutes in CBS. That suit was eventually settled and seems to kind of have been the last thing that needed to happen for the Trump administration to approve the merger of Skydance and Paramount. So the Ellisons, clearly continuing up through today in their pursuit of Warner Bro, have been willing to cater to the Trump administration and give in in certain respects when it's in their interest to do so.
- [17:24]
A
Well, that's exactly the, you know, there's this like, parallel news media conversation that's happening alongside The Hollywood conversation in a lot of these acquisitions, CBS being under Paramount, CNN being under Warner Brothers. Right. Which is part of that conversation. What kinds of changes have we seen since the Paramount merger went through? And how have we seen them reflected at cbs, if anyone's been able to draw connections as best they can?
- [17:53]
B
Yeah, well, I think David Ellison's first stop after he bought Paramount was to tour the CBS News offices. And that came on the heels of settling this 60 Minutes lawsuit. There was a lot of angst and a lot of concern about how he was going to try to redirect CBS News. So he showed up, walked through the offices. According to my reporting, he's never been back. And I think what that symbolizes is David has never cared about the news business. It's never really been something he's interested in. I think he probably would have been happy if he didn't have to buy CBS as part of buying Paramount, if he could have just bought the movie studio. But the reality is it's part of the business he owns. And so I think that the two things I heard is that one, he's going to try things to try to sort of rejuvenate CBS News, which has struggled a little bit in ratings and otherwise, and potentially that he is going to be willing to do things that might make the Trump administration happy. And so a few, a few months after buying Paramount, he bought the Free Press, which is this kind of right leaning publication started by Barry Weiss, who was named the editor in chief of CBS News. There's been a lot of angst over kind of the direction of CBS News. One of the weird things about the relationship is that Bari Weiss, typically the head of CBS News, would sort of report up through the head of CBS who would then report up to David Ellison. Bari Weiss reports directly to David Ellison. So that has fueled a lot of concern. As we've watched a few things happen over the past couple months. There was this kind of infamous spiking of a 60 minute segment about a prison in El Salvador at the last minute that didn't run for about a month because Bari Weiss had decided it was not ready. There have been a few just kind of question marks. And the fact that she reports directly to David, I think brings up this concern of kind of like while he is trying to appease the Trump administration, he is trying to get them on his his side so that they will oppose the Netflix deal to buy Warner Brothers and favor his deal. There's this concern that he will try to direct the news in sort of A Trump favorable direction.
- [20:00]
A
Right. I mean, this angst is now being felt in the CNN offices where they're talking about, you know, what will our newsroom look like if we are, in fact acquired in this way.
- [20:10]
B
Yeah. One of the things that's been reported is that Larry himself, who, you know, Larry has been very involved in these negotiations, meeting with the Warner Brothers side, meeting with the Trump admin, sort of using his connections and influence to try to make this deal happen. And one of the things that's been reported is that he even talked to Trump about replacing certain anchors on CNN that maybe Trump doesn't like. So you can see the ways in which, again, I'm not sure that the Ellisons, that it's exactly an exact corollary to say, the Murdochs, who have a clear sort of ideological vision for what they wanted Fox News to be. But like many powerful people, I think the Ellisons can look at the media sometimes and want it to be, you know, a little bit more in their direction. And I think they're going to be willing to make changes at CBS and CNN insofar as it seems to help them.
- [21:01]
A
Well, let's talk about what else is on the table in this acquisition deal. I mean, what do Netflix or Paramount stand to gain by acquiring Warner Brothers?
- [21:12]
B
Well, they obviously, at a basic level, stand to gain. One of the most iconic companies in Hollywood owns a film library, just sort of the most incredible film library there is, going back to Citizen Kane and just all kinds of popular, critically acclaimed movies. All of that also owns HBO and the HBO Max streaming service, which is the other kind of crown jewel of this acquisition and is a lot of the reason that both Netflix and Paramount are interested in this. If either of these companies were to combine with HBO, it would add something like 100 million subscribers to their streaming services. If Netflix gets it, they are already the just overwhelming leader in paid subscription streaming services. If they get HBO Max, then they are so far ahead of the competition. That's certainly one concern that people in Hollywood that I think consumers could have is just they're just going to dominate this industry and no one else will be able to compete. Paramount wants HBO Max because it's a much smaller streaming service. It hovers around fifth or sixth place behind Netflix, Disney, Amazon prime and hbo. And if it were able to acquire HBO Max, it would put it suddenly kind of on the level of Netflix and Amazon in terms of the number of subscribers and would help it compete. The Ellisons have kind of been on a campaign Both in Washington, D.C. and also in Europe, there are European regulators that have to approve this, to kind of push regulators to say this deal, if Netflix buys this, they're going to be too big. This can't work. And so that is certainly part of the play for the Ellisons. But both Netflix and Paramount, both sides are in different ways trying curry favor.
- [22:56]
A
From what you can tell, and having spoken to people in the industry, what do you think might happen? What feels likely to you?
- [23:02]
B
Oh, gosh. It's funny, you know, it's been an interesting saga to watch because when Paramount's interest in Warner Brothers was announced back in September, it sort of seemed almost like a done deal. It seemed unlikely that Netflix was even going to necessarily get in the game. So it's really swung wildly in different directions. If I had to place a bet now there is a Netflix deal that has been accepted by the Warner Brothers board that sort of puts you ahead out of the gate. There are potential regulatory issues with either acquisition from either side. We'll see. The two big remaining factors are what the regulators end up saying, and if we start to get signals that regulators in Europe or in the United States are uncomfortable with the Netflix deal, that could put that on shakier ground. The other thing that the Ellisons can still do is put in more money, put in more of Larry's money. And right now, the deals are roughly equivalent. There's some sort of account about how much value the cable networks are worth that can tip the scale in one direction or another. But the one thing that would make it a clearly better offer from Paramount would be more money. And the most obvious place that could come from is David's dad, Larry.
- [24:13]
A
Yeah, I mean, help me understand, for a regular person, for a viewer of things in this world, what does this actually mean?
- [24:21]
B
You know, as a consumer? You know, it's. There's no great option out there right now. I think whether Netflix buys Warner Brothers or if Paramount manages to buy the company, it's one fewer company out there making movies. And in some ways, the argument for consumers is, well, you know, now I'll just have my Netflix HBO subscription. I won't have to pay for both of them if that deal goes through. But what happens whenever Hollywood consolidates is there's just less stuff that gets made. As much as these companies are saying that they'll keep making more and more movies, they'll keep making more and more shows, that's what's going to happen. It's obviously going to be difficult for people who work in Hollywood. There will be layoffs there will. And ultimately, at the end of the day, I think in terms of. In terms of the quality, in some ways, the quantity of the work that we're gonna get, the shows we're gonna get to see, the movies we're gonna get to watch, you have to be a little bit nervous about what something like this means.
- [25:17]
A
Do you have any sense of what David really wants? What is he after? It seems like it's. It doesn't seem like his ambitions are financial because at every. As you've pointed out, he's had his dad there to back him. It doesn't seem to have been a motivating factor. So what is driving him?
- [25:36]
B
Yeah, I mean, the Oracle stock that David, through his father owns could make or lose more in a day than he could ever make on a movie. Are honestly from probably owning these businesses. And so I think at the end of the day, look, in some ways it probably goes back to the little boy David Ellison was in a number of ways. One, I think he genuinely, for all the criticisms that he gets, he loves movies. He loves the movie business. He wants it to be successful. He wants Hollywood to be successful. He wants to build a sustainable company that becomes a real player in Hollywood after years of kind of decline at Paramount and in some ways years of struggle at Warner Brothers as well. So there's that part of him, you know, the other part is whatever part of him is sort of like his dad was that wanted to prove himself. So growing this big giant company that could compete with the Netflixes and Disney's of the world is very appealing. And I'm sure there's the added bonus of saying, hey, dad, you know, look at what I built.
- [26:34]
A
Yeah. Reeves, thank you so much for coming and talking to me about this reporting.
- [26:39]
B
Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.
- [26:44]
A
We'll include a link to Reeves Weideman's profile of David Ellison on our Show Notes page. And every weekend, you can find new episodes of Apple News in conversation in the Apple News and app. Just tap on the audio tab, that's the little headphones at the bottom to find.