How Larry Ellison’s Trump Bromance Is Helping WarnerMount

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0:34Matt Belloni:This episode of The Town is presented by HBO Max. For your awards consideration, Max presents Hacks, the Emmy award-winning series starring Gene Smart and Hannah Einbinder. In the aftermath of mistaken news reports that Debra passed away, she and Ava returned to Las Vegas determined to secure Debra's legacy as a comedian. Don't miss the series Variety is calling one of TV's best comedies ever. Hacks is streaming on HBO Max. Watch now. It is Friday, June 26th. Throughout the ongoing saga of Paramount buying Warner Brothers, there's been one figure quietly hovering over everything. Larry Ellison.

1:11Matt Belloni:He does no media interviews and is rarely photographed, yet he's been one of the richest men in the world for decades now as the founder of Oracle. Ellison used to make headlines for his extravagant Malibu homes, or buying a Hawaiian island, or bankrolling the Indian Wells Tennis Tournament, America's Cup sailing competition. But these days, at 81 years old, he's in the news mostly because he's helping his son, David, buy two legacy Hollywood studios and roll them up into what the Ellisons hope will be a technology-empowered media megastudio that can credibly take on Netflix, Amazon, Disney, and the others.

1:44Matt Belloni:And to do so, Larry has leaned hard into his relationship with Donald Trump. He's always been a Republican donor, but we learned in the Wall Street Journal this week that just before David's Skydance Media went after Paramount, Larry quietly made more than$45 million in donations to Trump's election campaign. He's donated more since, and he's also cultivated a close friendship with the fellow octogenarian billionaire who seems to share a political and social worldview with the elder Ellison. So much so that to understand the Trump-Larry relationship is to sort of understand why the president has been such a cheerleader for the Ellisons owning Paramount, and why the Trump Justice Department just gave an okay to the Warnamount merger pretty much sight unseen.

2:27Matt Belloni:I've been curious about the Larry angle, so I asked Emily Glazer to come on the show. She's a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the Wall Street Journal, our second journal reporter this week, sort of a coincidence. She co-wrote that story on Larry Ellison, and she covers powerful people as her beat. So today, it's the Larry angle on the Warnermount merger and the personal relationship behind the biggest deal in Hollywood history. From The Ringer and Puck, I'm Matt Bellany, and this is The Town.

2:55Matt Belloni:All right, we are here with Emily Glazer, who is an enterprise reporter at The Wall Street Journal and a genuine, honest-to-God Pulitzer Prize winner. Welcome. I'll take that welcome any day. Thanks, Matt. You know, the Pulitzer committee never gets back to us. We submit our box office draft every year and nothing. I'm still waiting. Lucas is very disappointed. I wish I could tell you I had an amazing in, but I'm not that powerful. Someday. Maybe this episode. Someday. We'll use your clout. Right. It could all change after this. All right. So we have you on today because I want to talk about the Larry angle in the Paramount Warner Brothers merger.

3:37Matt Belloni:And by Larry, I mean Larry Ellison. Where is he now on the list of richest people? Is he still top 10? He is still top 10. So for a hot second, he was number one. As you can imagine with Elon and the SpaceX IPO, he is not number one anymore. But you and I are on the same page because I did pull up the Bloomberg Billionaires Index before this podcast. And he's number six, according to them, behind Elon, Larry Page, the other Larry, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell, at a whopping$211 billion. Sad for Larry. He needs to pick up the pace. We need to get him into that top five. We'll share that.

4:14He is above Mark Zuckerberg, though. That must feel good.

4:17Matt Belloni:I wanted to have you on because Larry has always been painted during all of these discussions around the deal as sort of a periphery figure, at least from the Hollywood perspective. This has been David Ellison's show. Obviously, Paramount is very interested in promoting. This is David's show. He's making all the decisions. He's the mastermind behind all this. But then you and your colleagues at the Journal dropped this story this week that essentially painted a picture that was a little different than what has been out there. Larry, first of all, has kind of greased the wheels here with a undisclosed$45 million donation to the Trump campaign.

4:58Matt Belloni:Other heretofore undisclosed donations after that. He's had several meetings with Trump. and is sort of, at least how I read your story, been the, if not the puppeteer behind this, certainly a big and powerful voice beyond just putting up the money and guaranteeing this$110 billion deal. Am I right in that reading? I think you are. I mean, you know, there's always the nuances around it, but here I would say Larry is not just the money man, although he obviously has an insane amount of money and the money has helped. But when it comes to Larry Ellison and President Trump, there's actually a genuine friendship and they genuinely like each other.

5:43Matt Belloni:You think that? Does a guy like Larry have any real friends? I truly do. So let me let me like paint this for you a little bit. OK. These are friends with benefits and a different kind than what we're usually used to feeling. Don't say that. Oh, God. I'm going to go vomit. OK, sorry, sorry. Friends with business benefits. Larry Ellison and Donald Trump, from what I hear from what my sources tell me, genuinely enjoy spending time together. Trump just turned 80. Larry is 81. I'm not saying they're friends just because then they're 80s. I'm just trying to like paint a little picture for you. They have similar ideological beliefs.

6:19They actually have things that they get along about. And I think that what I've heard is that Trump doesn't just view Larry as someone that like like, needs something from him, even though he does. But, like, Larry's got his own power. He's got his own money. He's got his own influence. He has his own relationship. So I feel like, I don't want to say they're equals, but I think that in some cases, like, there is actually, like, genuine connection that they have, which when I learned that, I was like, oh, wow, that's really interesting. And that was kind of a kernel for me of exploring this more.

6:48Matt Belloni:It's funny you say that because I'm thinking now to this new book that just came out, regime change, which has some pretty entertaining moments in it where Trump is showing off the fact that he's getting text messages from all of these billionaire tech moguls like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. You don't hear in that book Trump making fun of Larry Ellison. And they do talk a lot. I know for a fact they talk on the phone quite a bit. They also see each other. Larry Ellison officially changed his residence to Florida, just about 20 minutes south of Mar-a-Lago. He still has his Hawaii residence, but he's got this huge compound very close to Palm Beach.

7:30So they're physically close, but they also do talk on the phone a lot. And to your point about what's the deal with Paramount, you better believe that they were on the phone around a lot of the ins and outs and shenanigans as that went down. And that's some of what we report. Yes.

7:45Matt Belloni:And when you mentioned that they have ideological shared beliefs, what do you mean by that? Is it just Israel? Because we all know Larry is a big supporter of Israel. And in fact, some of my reporting I've done suggests that that not the Trump stuff, that is really the ideological driver of a lot of this stuff at CBS News, where they've taken the direction of CBS News in a very different way with Barry Weiss. And even the entire kind of goal of the company, they feel very strongly, both Larry and David, that there needs to be a protector of Israel in the media. So, and kudos to your reporting.

8:28I've seen a lot of that great reporting. There's definitely an Israel connection. Obviously, Trump's relationship with Bibi right now is much more fraught than it has been, but they do have a longstanding rapport. Larry and Netanyahu have a longstanding rapport. there's that connection. But it's not just that. My understanding is that they also both have a shared dislike for some mainstream media to travel back in time quite a bit when Larry was really in the heyday of his tech years. He got a ton of press, and I've been told over the years that he just absolutely despises that and really eschews a lot of that.

9:05So it's very interesting to see David building this media conglomerate when it's something that Larry has... especially with legacy media, is like really not a big fan of most of those organizations. And so I think that's something that he and Trump bond over. And I think that they also genuinely both have, like I said before, they're kind of like from a similar generation. They both have a lot of money. They both have a lot of power. They both need things from each other. But I think they both have like a shared respect for one another. It's very odd. I mean, it's always really interesting when you see friendships at this level of power, because I think people are always used to when you have a lot of money or power, like someone wants something, there's got to be like the favor or the ask.

9:49And their rapport has that. But there's also been all these bumpy years, too. And money at least has solved that for Larry Ellison. So it's not always been a pretty friendship.

9:59Matt Belloni:Yeah, I've always thought that Larry, who's by all accounts, extremely intelligent, had sort of identified Trump as a useful idiot that he could cozy up to and get a lot of out of, unlike previous presidential regimes where he could not. And in fact, Larry has had other candidates that he's supported, not Donald Trump, and has managed to kind of win his way back into the good graces. I just don't like, maybe I'm more cynical. I just have a hard time believing that a guy like Larry Ellison actually wants to hang out with Donald Trump. So honestly, I'm having flashbacks a little bit of, I remember years ago, I was talking to Andrew Russ Sorkin and he was like grilling me about this article I wrote about Elon Musk potentially becoming a political advisor to Donald Trump should Donald Trump win.

10:52And he was like, I don't believe it. I don't believe it. And I was like, no, no, no, this is like a real thing. And I will tell you, Matt, I'm having some flashbacks here. Like I really, I also was, I am a very skeptical person. I'm a very paranoid person. Trust, like, you know, ask anyone who knows me. I'm always just like wondering, like, could that be true? I think they genuinely, I think that Donald Trump and Larry Ellison like genuinely like each other. But that's not, I mean, that's so simple, right? This is obviously just way more complex than that. And let's not forget in the 1990s and 2000s, Larry Ellison was like a huge Clinton guy.

11:29Oh, yeah. Bill Clinton, okay? Like Bill Clinton spoke at this big Oracle event. I was looking up this story from, I think it was like 2001, where there were all these reports that there were rumors that Larry wanted Bill Clinton to join the Oracle board. So like, even though we all think of Larry Ellison as this like Trump guy and Republican, which he has been for a number of years, you know, you mentioned he supported other candidates. He was a huge backer of Tim Scott going into the 2024 presidential race, only switched to Trump, only gave that$45 million donation toward his reelection once, at least our understanding is, once he saw that the writing was on the wall and Trump was going to be the Republican nominee.

12:10But going back to 2016, he was a Marco Rubio supporter. So he's popped around. I just think it's interesting that he's also supported Democrats back in the day, as has and is widely known, David Ellison.

12:22Matt Belloni:Yeah, David gave to the Harris-Biden campaign, and he also has given to other Democrats. He was like a fixture on the L.A. Democratic fundraiser circuit, although pointedly, he has not given to either party in the Trump years. Right, and now he's a fixture at the UFC circuit now. So we'll get into that. I just remember when I saw Gavin Newsom at a party in D.C. for the correspondence dinner, I said I asked him what he thought of Larry Ellison. And he's like he just like rolled his eyes, like, don't even get me started on that guy. It seemed like there was a long history between the two of them.

13:03I got it. I feel like I need to pull up the Federal Election Commission records and see if there's anything there.

13:08Matt Belloni:I'm sure. But any of the good stuff would not be there. Right. And Oracle is so heavily invested in California. I'm sure he's annoyed by the taxes and all that, all the stuff that there's always, we couldn't even start this conversation without being like, and then they're annoyed about the billionaire's tax. Like, come on, of course. All right. So let's take this towards Paramount and now Paramount Warner brothers, because I want to know, and just getting into the psychology of Larry, is this just that his son, his only adult son wants to do this, and he is going to do everything in his power to make sure his son fulfills his dream of owning a big media company?

13:49Matt Belloni:Or is Larry the mastermind here and sees a roll-up of media assets combined with what he can do with the technology angle at Oracle, combined with what he is building with TikTok now. And he is the one who sees this in the big picture and that this could be a real media powerhouse. It's definitely more the latter than the former, as I presume you know. Let's take each piece of that apart for a moment. As is widely out there, Larry Ellison and David Ellison and have not just had some like happy-go-lucky father-son rapport their whole lives. I don't think it's as simple as Larry just trying to do this to like please his son or repair anything with his son.

14:41I have not heard that. I do think that Larry is an absolute mastermind. I've heard that he is someone, even when I've talked to people that have worked with him at Oracle over the years, that is amazing as like a strategic mind and connecting the dots. And even now he's executive chairman and like chief technology officer. He's still calling the shots at Oracle. Sorry to the Oracle co-CEOs and Safra cats. I'm just saying that's what I have heard. I am sure, you know, day to day, it's always different, but he's still extremely powerful and he's still very thoughtful and putting a lot of effort into what he sees as the future of media and tech.

15:22And I think that it's very poignant that you mentioned TikTok and that you also mentioned the media elements of this because for many years, you know, Larry's been the Oracle guy and it's sort of been this like kind of boring big tech company, but like very B2B, you know, it's not as sexy as like a Facebook or a Google or even what like, you know, Elon's building a SpaceX or Tesla, you know, it's kind of been able to do its own thing and largely stay out of the news. I think a lot of that is by design. and he has tiptoed more and more into these other elements of media and technology where they overlap.

15:56And the Trump administration has helped him a lot along the way. And it's not just getting access and running this US part of TikTok. It's not just Oracle getting in on Stargate and getting access to this massive AI project. I mean, there's government contracts that Oracle has gotten and it's not just what's happened with CBS, Yes, what's happened with Paramount? What's happened with Warner Brothers? Like, there's just so many elements of this. So yes, I think we should give a lot of credit to Larry Ellison is a very long way to answer your question.

16:28Matt Belloni:Yeah, then the other question is, why didn't he bankroll more of this? Certainly has the money. Why force them to go out and get Saudi money, Abu Dhabi money, Qatari money? And in the original deal, he wasn't even going to backstop it. And ultimately, he came in and guaranteed a lot of these loans and the overall deal. But I always wondered, if you're that rich, just what are you doing dealing with this other money? Wouldn't you like to be a fly on the wall in those conversations, Matt? I'm sure you have been a little bit. I know. I'm asking you things that are unknowable. I think that with anyone who is extremely wealthy, there's only so much liquid cash to go around, number one.

17:15um so there's just like that part of it to consider well and the oracle stock is dictating

17:21Matt Belloni:a lot of this and it has come down significantly since the the highs uh the a year or two ago so his personal wealth fluctuates a lot it's funny we had i had some readers wall street journal readers or or maybe they just found this on the internet after that were like yeah we saw that story but did you see oracle stock is down so like really none of this matters I was like, okay, that's one way to look at it. So yeah, I just think no matter how wealthy you are, there's always how much of that cash is liquid. I think that's the best answer I could give to that. Otherwise, I wish I had the magic ball.

17:57And you better believe I wish I were in on all those conversations. But listen, Larry is spending his money in lots of different ways. And part of why we wrote the story is that there's a lot more money he's spending toward Trump and Trump efforts than was known. And so he's not putting all his money in the Paramount basket. That would be really odd if he did, right?

18:18Matt Belloni:It would be. It would be very odd. So I get it. And you don't get to where he is without making smart deals. And he probably wanted to provide just enough financing with Redbird and with the others to make this happen without providing a penny more. I guess there's a reason why he is where he is, you know?

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21:34Matt Belloni:One thing that surprised me was the willingness of David Ellison to contact board members, or at least one board member of Paramount before he owned the company to try to get this Trump litigation settled. that was unknown to me and suggested that there was uh that he has sort of he had sort of like claimed clean hands on that one that happened before his time at the company david has said this was a sherry redstone thing they decided to pay off trump to get his blessing for the paramount acquisition by skydance and now we learn that he was behind the scenes pushing for that Paramount's downplaying that, but it seems like pretty active there.

22:20We're getting spicy. Yes. So first of all, I just want to note that I wrote this story with two incredible colleagues, Annie Linsky, White House reporter, and Jessica Tunkle, who is a senior media and tech reporter. I have to shout out my colleagues because so much of the reporting here is like a team effort, not to sound corny, but I just wanted to say that. So let's travel back in time as you started to bring us. David Ellison, you know, he was his company. Then it was Skydance. They're in the midst of merging with CBS's owner, Paramount. He meets with Trump at this UFC event in April 2025.