David Ellison — son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison, one of Trump’s closest allies in Silicon Valley — is about to close the biggest media merger in American history. We’re talking Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery combined into one mega-company. CBS, CNN, HBO, Paramount Pictures, DC Comics, Nickelodeon, HGTV, the Discovery Channel — all of it, under one roof, controlled by a guy who had dinner at Mar-a-Lago three times last year.
Elizabeth Warren is absolutely losing her mind. You love to see it.
The deal is worth $111 billion. That’s not a typo. Ellison’s company Skydance is merging Paramount with Warner Bros. Discovery in what would be the largest media transaction in history. The shareholder vote is set for April 23, and unless something truly bizarre happens in the next two weeks, this thing is getting done.
Now here’s the part that has every progressive journalist in America updating their LinkedIn profiles. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund is putting in $10 billion. Qatar is kicking in another chunk. Abu Dhabi too. Total foreign investment: $24 billion. And before the left starts screaming about “foreign influence over American media” — which they are, loudly, right now — the deal specifically bars foreign investors from getting board seats or voting rights. They’re writing checks. That’s it. They don’t get to pick what CNN runs at 8 PM.
(Not that CNN’s current programming choices have been working out so well for them. Their ratings are somewhere between C-SPAN 3 and that channel that plays fireplace videos at Christmas.)
Warren fired off a letter demanding antitrust investigations, because of course she did. This is the same woman who wanted to break up Amazon, Google, Apple, and basically every company that employs more than 50 people. Her concern isn’t monopoly power. Her concern is that CNN might stop being a 24-hour anti-Trump infomercial.
Think about what’s actually happening here. For the past decade, legacy media has operated as the communications wing of the Democratic Party. CNN spent four years calling Trump a Russian asset. CBS’s “60 Minutes” edited Kamala Harris’s answers to make her sound coherent — which, honestly, deserved some kind of visual effects award. These networks have been running interference for the left since before most of us cut the cord.
And now a guy who golfs with Trump is about to own all of it.
The progressive media commentators are already in full panic mode. They’re calling it a “threat to press freedom” — which is hilarious coming from the same crowd that cheered when Big Tech censored the Hunter Biden laptop story two weeks before the 2020 election. Press freedom for me but not for thee, as usual.
The best part? There’s not much they can do about it. The deal doesn’t require CFIUS review because the foreign investors have no operational control. The FTC would have to prove the merger creates a monopoly, which is a tough sell when Netflix, Disney, Amazon, and Apple are all competing in the same space. And Congress? Congress can write angry letters. Warren is very good at writing angry letters. That’s basically her entire legislative career — angry letters and selfie lines.
Larry Ellison, David’s father, is now worth over $200 billion and is one of the richest men on the planet. He’s also been one of Trump’s most reliable allies in the tech world. When other Silicon Valley billionaires were tripping over themselves to distance from Trump after January 6th, Ellison was hosting fundraisers. The Ellison family doesn’t flinch.
So what does this mean for CNN? Nobody knows yet. Maybe nothing changes. Maybe everything changes. But the mere possibility that CNN could stop being a progressive propaganda outlet has Democrats acting like someone just cancelled their subscription to democracy.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are just sitting here watching Elizabeth Warren have a conniption about a free market transaction between willing buyers and willing sellers — which is literally how capitalism works. Somebody should send her a copy of “Economics for Dummies.” Or better yet, a copy of her own DNA test results to remind her of the last time she was confidently wrong about something.
The shareholder vote is April 23. Mark your calendars. If this goes through, one Trump-friendly family will control more media real estate than anyone since William Randolph Hearst. And the only people upset about it are the same people who spent the last ten years telling us that media consolidation was fine — as long as their guys were running the show.
Funny how that works.