Move over Murdochs, here come the Ellisons

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:08Today, the billionaire father and son buying up the American media.

0:21Who's the smartest guy you've ever met? You hang out with some brilliant people. What's a CEO you look at other than yourself? What CEO do you say, damn, that guy's good? Larry Ellison's very smart. So I'll say Larry Ellison's one of the smartest people. You know that voice. It's Elon Musk, of course. He's talking about Larry Ellison, a tech entrepreneur who at one point last year surpassed him as the world's richest man, thanks to an AI-driven boom in the stock price of his software company, Oracle. At 81 years old, you might expect Larry to want to put his feet up, possibly on Lanai, the Hawaiian island he snapped up for$300 million back in 2012.

1:01He could be relaxing there with his sixth wife, Jolyn, who is 47 years his junior. But retirement isn't Larry's style.

1:09Margaret Sullivan:If you do everything everyone else does in business, you're going to lose. The only way to get ahead, to really get ahead, is to be different. Instead, he has decided to become a media mogul. A big one. Huge. The kind that probably makes Rupert Murdoch feel insecure. And like Murdoch, Larry likes his children to get involved in the family business. Meet David, his eldest son. And we want to be in the truth business, we want to be in the trust business, and that's not going to change. David is a film fanatic who made his first movie aged just 23. Financed with daddy's money, obviously. He starred in it too, alongside James Franco.

1:49Looking back, we had no idea what to expect.

1:57We were a bunch of Americans with nothing in common, except we wanted to learn to fly. It was a flop, and David was written off as the ultimate Nepo baby. But after a string of failures, he finally had a hit as a film producer, the Top Gun Maverick. Good morning, aviators. This is your captain speaking.

2:25Margaret Sullivan:And we're off. And then Pops bought in Paramount Studios, which came with CBS News attached. And there, he's been accused of turning the broadcaster into a pro-Trump propaganda machine. Now, father and son have their eyes set on Warner Brothers too.

2:47If the$110 billion deal goes through, it will make the Ellisons not just the most powerful movie magnates in Hollywood, but also the most powerful media magnates on the planet. Because with Warner comes CNN, one of the most prestigious news networks in the world. From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt. Today in Focus, move over the Murdochs, here come the Ellisons.

3:16Margaret Sullivan, welcome back to Today in Focus. It's nice to see you. Thank you. It's very nice to be back with you. So you are a columnist for Guardian US with a very storied career. Before you were at the Guardian, you were the media columnist, weren't you, for the Washington Post? And obviously we're talking today about the Ellison family. And there are probably quite a few of our listeners who haven't actually heard of them in spite of their, as we will hear, enormous influence. Let's start with the patriarch, Larry Ellison. Who is he? What Larry Ellison is best known for is being the co-founder of the big software company known as Oracle.

3:51Margaret Sullivan:Oracle Autonomous Database is 100 % self-driving. It needs no human intervention. And that is a huge financial success. And he is one of the very richest people on the planet. I mean, sometimes he's like number two or three. I don't know. He might be six right now. It varies, but he's in the top 10. And so he has enormous wealth. And he is, I guess I'll use the adjective Trumpy. He's Trumpy. He's a friend and ally, I guess you could say, of President Trump. That's kind of the source of the huge money and also of the kind of political leaning. Larry Ellison's a friend of mine. He's a great guy.

4:39I think he's great. He's got a son who's a fantastic young man too. And what about David, the eldest of Larry's children? He's the first fruit of the marriage with wife number one. He's the failed actor turned film producer who since last year has been the CEO of Paramount after his dad bought it for him. And Paramount doesn't just make films, does he? It also does news. His son, David, who is the CEO of the company, which the name has changed. It's been Paramount, Paramount Skydance, this and that, that owns CBS News, which, you know, is a talk about storied, a storied news network in the United States that, you know, was the home of Edward R.

5:26Murrow, Walter Cronkite. and some of the very best broadcast journalism of an earlier era. And CBS was known as the Tiffany Network because it was the class of the networks in the U.S. So now we have the Ellisons, and it's David in the CEO suite, but certainly his father wielding some influence, having tremendous impact on CBS News. So Larry Ellison started out then as a tech entrepreneur. And as you say, that's where he made his enormous wealth. What is he like as a person?

6:06Margaret Sullivan:I think my favorite line is, I had all the disadvantages necessary for success. And I think if it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger. So I've always been very ambitious. I've always been very curious. He seems to be someone who's not worried about being involved in politics. You would hope, I guess I would hope, that someone who has so much contact with the media would talk about editorial independence and all of that. But he seems to embrace his right-wing politics and certainly has been cozy with Trump. Yeah, very cozy. And there have been lots of dinners at Mar-a-Lago, haven't there? And the day after Trump's inauguration, Larry was at the White House to announce Trump's Stargate initiative, which is a plan to spend$500 billion in AI infrastructure in the US by 2029.

7:02This is to me a very big thing,$500 billion Stargate project. I think it's going to be something that's very special. It'll lead to something that could be the biggest of all. So, Larry, maybe we'll start with you and we'll go down the line. Thank you.

7:18Margaret Sullivan:Thank you, Mr. President. We certainly couldn't do this without you. It would simply be impossible. AI holds incredible promise for all of us. It's kind of funny watching the video because Larry and Trump seem to share the same hairdresser or perhaps the same hair peacemaker, dare we say. How far back does that relationship go? So Donald Trump has been essentially in power in the United States for the past roughly 10 years. His first campaign was in 2015. And, you know, I believe that Larry Ellison was friendly with Trump and was certainly a contributor. But it's only been in the past few years, you know, in the more recent campaign and now in Trump's second term, which of course was interrupted by that pesky little term of Joe Biden's, that he's really come forward as a political force.

8:13And is it just a case of donating money to the Trump campaign and the Trump administration, or does it go further than that in terms of what Larry Ellison has done for and with the White House? I think it's largely contributing, but it's also this sort of rubbing elbows, hanging out with, showing up at events, and making clear that we're on the same side. And that has really exploded, I think, in recent years. And even more so, I would say, in recent months. Because as CBS News has been part of a couple now of different media mergers, that has come to the forefront. And a lot of the controversy that arose from the Ellison takeover of Paramount had nothing really to do with the film part of the business, but the news side.

9:04Tell us what happened to CBS with them in charge. How has it changed with Larry and David at the helm? I like to track this back to a lawsuit that Donald Trump filed against CBS News before the Ellisons were involved. It happened during the most recent presidential campaign, which feels like it was about 10 years ago, but in fact was in 2024. So 60 Minutes, which is this flagship magazine show, the top rated news show in America, did a pretty standard kind of profile piece on Trump's rival for the presidency, Kamala Harris. and in the course of it, they did what always happens on these shows. They edited it and that's normal.

9:55And in fact, it's necessary, but Trump decided that it was edited. I mean, I don't know if he really believed this or what I never really know what he's thinking, which might be an okay thing, but he sued CBS news. He sued 60 minutes for editing that he said was false and misleading and made her sound more cogent than she actually was. Well, CBS did something that was amazing. Kamala was unable to answer a question properly. And they took the question that they asked and they inserted an answer. They gave her an answer. Nobody's ever heard of anything like this before. And the FCC is looking at it very strongly and everybody's looking at it, but it probably did affect the election.

10:45Yeah, probably could have won by more, but I could have lost the election because of that. And, you know, even though that was an extremely, extremely defensible edit, CBS and its parent company decided to settle that case out of court when they definitely could have fought and won, but they didn't. Right. And this settlement, which handed Trump$16 million, came right as the Ellisons were in the process of buying Paramount and merging it with David's Skydance Media Company. And so, you know, one of the things that happened quickly after that was this late night comic host, Stephen Colbert, said on his show that he saw that move, that settlement, as, quote, a big fat bribe.

11:32Now, I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles, it's Big Fat Bribe. Because... And it did look that way. And listeners will probably remember that a few days later, what happens? CBS decides not to renew Colbert's contract. I'm going to go ahead and say it. Cancel culture has gone too far. You may have heard the news. Last week, we learned that The Late Show will be ending in May. Over the weekend, it sunk in that they're killing off our show. But they made one mistake. They left me alive. It wasn't so much that it was an incredibly huge amount of money, but rather that the case was settled and that then Trump was able to run around saying, see, they admitted they were wrong.

12:22And that sort of set the tone for other settlements by media companies that have come afterwards. It would have been really great from a First Amendment point of view if CBS News had defended itself in court instead of settling the way it did. So I think that's sort of the original sin, if you will. The Ellisons were a part of that. And Paramount, which was at that time, the owner of CBS News, was trying to combine with Skydance. Well, how could we do this? We can make sure that Trump is on our side. So while the deal was going through, the Ellison said, right, let's just settle. Yeah. Before it went through, while it was still, There are people, many people who think that these big media mergers are inappropriate, someplace between inappropriate and illegal.

13:13Because as these companies get bigger and bigger and become these conglomerates, there's a question of whether they are monopolies and whether they should be broken up or just not allowed to become huger and huger. So there could have been regulatory stumbling blocks, but there weren't. Which may or may not be related to the$16 million that was given to Donald Trump, who had just returned to the White House at that particular moment. I mean, you can't say there was an absolute cause and effect, but you can say what came first and what came second. Indeed. And so they do take over Paramount, and that means that they are at the helm of CBS News, the Ellisons.

13:54How has it actually changed under their ownership? I think the Ellisons have made it clear that they wanted to change the tone of CBS News. And the way they would put it is to appeal to all Americans and to not be left-wing anymore. And was it left-wing? No, it was never left-wing. These television networks, CBS and NBC and ABC, their news products tend to really be very cautious. And they really, in my view, they take it right down the middle. sometimes to a fault. At any rate, it seemed pretty clear that they wanted to move it to the right without saying we want to move it to the right. What they said was we want to appeal to all Americans and we want to tell your stories and all of that.

14:42That's kind of a cover for what was actually intended, I think, and what has in fact happened. One of the first things that that David Ellison did in his role as head of CBS News was to bring on a new editor-in-chief. This new editor-in-chief is a woman named Barry Weiss. And Barry Weiss, interestingly, given that she was now editor-in-chief of CBS News, had absolutely no broadcast experience. Her experience was as an opinion editor at the New York Times where she ruffled some feathers and had her own feathers ruffled and left under not very happy circumstances. I mean, of her own accord, but unhappily.

15:26Didn't she essentially say that the New York Times had become too woke? Oh, yeah. That's Barry Weiss's big thing, is the whole world is way too woke and, you know, too focused on diversity, too interested in all of those kinds of diversity, equity, and inclusion issues that have been such a part of the culture war in recent months and years. So she founded a website called The Free Press. And The Free Press is, while it calls itself a news website, is really an opinion website that is most devoted to anti-woke kinds of coverage. which Barry Weiss is also a staunch Zionist. And that is a part of where she's coming from.

16:18She becomes the editor-in-chief of CBS News, and I think it can be described as a weird appointment. But if you were trying to move CBS News to the right and make it more appealing to the Trump administration or to right-wing politicians, she would be a perfect choice. And is there any evidence that under her editorship, CBS has indeed moved to the right? Yeah, there's all kinds of evidence. I mean, one of the first things she did was hold back at the 11th hour, I mean, more than the 11th hour, the 55th minute of the 11th hour, a piece that CBS News had been planning to run about a detention facility that was very harsh on migrants that the Trump administration has been putting in detention camps.

17:13And so... It was in El Salvador. Yes, in El Salvador. But the migrants were Venezuelan for the most part. And the piece had been vetted. It had been lawyered. It had been seen by everybody. And in one of her first actions, Barry Weiss comes in and says, no, we're not going to run that right now. I'm postponing it until we can get comment from the Trump administration, which now that's a reasonable thing to do. But there had already been great effort to do that and they hadn't gotten it. So in some ways, it seemed like it was just an effort to hold it back. And there was a huge furor over that.

17:54The main correspondent, Sharon Alfonsi, said publicly that she felt that that was a politically driven decision and not an editorial driven one. So Barry Weiss came under a lot of criticism for that. And the piece has since appeared without that commentary from the Trump administration. It didn't really make any difference to hold it. And it caused people to say, wow, this is really out of line. It was very unusual. And since then, a number of top people have either left or decided to leave CBS News. And one of them is Anderson Cooper. Anderson Cooper is a big host on CNN, anchor, and also has been a correspondent and a host for 60 minutes.

18:42and he decided quite recently he's done there. And he said he wanted to spend more time with his family. I think most people understood that he wasn't happy with the direction that 60 Minutes seemed to be taking. There have been others, some big names, some not so big names that have left and they've all tended to say the same thing which is that they felt that editorial independence had been impinged upon. And it's not just legacy media, is it, that the Ellisons are interested in. Larry Ellison, as of January, has a pretty significant stake in TikTok. He has a 15 % stake, apparently, which cost him around$2 billion.

19:21How important do you think that stake is and what sort of influence does it give him? When we talk about being able to control the media and control the message, you know, if you talk to young people, TikTok is a way that they're getting their news. And it's a hugely... Yeah, they're not watching CNN. They're not watching CNN and they're certainly not watching CBS News' evening broadcast or even 60 Minutes, that one of the most influential social media platforms is TikTok. And so it makes a lot of sense for Larry Ellison to have formed this consortium that very recently gained a significant hold on TikTok.

20:01And I think that that's a sort of a future-leaning effort so that it's not just the old stuff. It's also the current and undoubtedly future of media in the U.S. and around the world.

20:23Today's CNN breaking news is about CNN. It looks like Paramount is the future owner of CNN and the rest of Warner Brothers Discovery after a months-long corporate tug-of-war. So as we've said, a year ago, the Ellisons took over Paramount, and now they have got their eyes on arguably an even bigger prize, which is Warner Brothers Discovery, another movie studio that does all kinds of other things in addition to making films. but they had big competition to get their hands on Warner Brothers, didn't they? The conflict in trying to get Warner Brothers' discovery was between Netflix and Paramount Skydance.

20:59Yeah, it was a two-horse race at the start, wasn't it? Yes. And in fact, the board had accepted the offer from Netflix, and it didn't look like Paramount was going to be able to get it. Now it appears that they will. Yeah, and under the Paramount umbrella are a whole host of marquee names like HBO, Discovery, Eurosport, the Cartoon Network, which are all presumably part of the appeal, as well as CNN. It's mostly not a news company, but they do happen to own CNN. And CNN is a news company that Trump has always, always disliked and always criticized. They take a story with absolutely nothing that didn't exist, and they put it front page news because they want to poison the minds of the voters.

21:52And there were, you know, when he was running the first time for president, you could hear the chants, chants of CNN sucks, because he would set up his followers, the MAGA people, to hate CNN. And he has always criticized them. You know, for example, they have a correspondent whose name is Caitlin Collins, who covers the White House. She's very good. She's very fair. And Trump particularly criticizes and hates her and calls her stupid and all this sort of stuff. Yeah, what did you say? What would you say to the survivors who feel they've gotten justice? You are the worst reporter. CNN has no ratings because of people like you.

22:32You know, she's a young woman. I don't think I've ever seen you smile. I've known you for... Trump would love to see the same thing happen with CNN that has happened with CBS News. Right. And there's every reason to think that that is exactly what would happen. So the people at CNN are pretty freaked out because they've seen, you know, now they can see what's happened and they can see that it may very well be coming at them as well. And is there any evidence that Trump has helped kind of grease the wheels of this deal so that the Ellicons have ended up the final bidder? I mean, look, he's the president of the United States.

23:09He's not shy about telling his supposedly impartial regulatory people what to do, and they seem willing to do it. And he's also said he thinks it would be a great idea if CNN were under new ownership and would change. You know, I mean, you don't really have to delve too deeply to know that this is something that he would like, and he and his appointed people are helping it along the way. I think the people that have run CNN for a long period of time are a disgrace. I think it's imperative that CNN be sold because you certainly wouldn't want to just leave those people with some money, good money, so that, you know, they can spend even more money spreading poison because it's lies.

23:55David Ellison has insisted that CNN's editorial independence will be maintained. But it sounds like you think that there is a risk that CNN gets CBS, that the same thing that happen there could easily happen to CNN. Yeah, I think that what's happened at CBS News could easily happen at CNN. One of the interesting things about the Netflix deal, and probably something that really turned Trump and his people off to it, is that Netflix was planning to spin off CNN into sort of a separate company, in a sense, sort of seed editorial control in a way that I think would, you know, I'm not really in favor of these big mergers anyway, but if there were going to be one, that would be healthier from an editorial independence point of view.

24:42And how close is the deal to being done? Are there still a few hurdles that they have to get over in order to form this kind of gargantuan company, which will have such a large slice of the media market? Well, the Warner Brothers Discovery Board accepted Netflix's offer, and then this bigger, better, richer one came along. So the board is ready to roll. And there don't seem to be any real hurdles on the federal side for reasons that I've talked about. But there are potentially state rules and regulations in California, for example, that could get in the way. And there are a number of state attorneys general who are making a legal effort to stop it.

25:28And that's where it stands right now. If you look at the trajectory, I think it's unlikely that those efforts will be successful. I think the most likely thing is that the Ellisons and Paramount will, in fact, get their prize that they want and will, in fact, control CNN.