Larry Ellison also has a stake in TikTok. Archive link
Last summer, Paramount Skydance, itself a newly merged media company chaired by David Ellison, the son of the tech billionaire and Trump ally Larry Ellison, put in a bid to buy the combined Warner Bros. Discovery. It said no, thanks, but the interest did ultimately trigger a sales process, and a bidding war. Trump was, by now, back in office, and the issue of CNN again reared its ugly head. Paramount Skydance, which already owns CBS News, had courted controversy by pulling the network in a Trumpward direction; according to the Guardian, Ellison père dangled the prospect of similar changes at CNN, including the ouster of specific anchors—Brianna Keilar; Erin Burnett—whom Trump is known to dislike. By December, the Ellisons were on their heels: Warner Bros. accepted a rival bid from Netflix. [...] Trump didn’t sound pleased. “They have a very big market share,” Trump said, of Netflix. “I’ll be involved in that decision.”
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Sure enough, by this past weekend, Trump was bashing Netflix again, calling on the company to remove Susan Rice, a former top Obama official, from its board after she predicted future “accountability” for corporations that have bent the knee to Trump. Meanwhile, Paramount, which never gave up on its pursuit of Warner Bros., was given the opportunity to submit a final, improved offer, and did so. Yesterday, Ted Sarandos, the co-C.E.O. of Netflix, met with officials at the White House (but not with Trump himself) for talks that were reportedly cordial, yet ominous for the company’s deal prospects. Around the same time, Warner Bros. announced that it had deemed Paramount’s latest bid to be superior. Netflix had four days to counter it. An hour or so later, however, it announced that it was walking away, stunning the media world.
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Paramount’s bid now appears to be on a glide path, at least at the federal level.
Larry Ellison also has a stake in TikTok.
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