{"id":320479,"date":"2026-02-27T18:03:10","date_gmt":"2026-02-27T18:03:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/320479\/"},"modified":"2026-02-27T18:03:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T18:03:10","slug":"david-ellison-wins-it-doesnt-yet-make-him-a-winner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/320479\/","title":{"rendered":"David Ellison Wins. It Doesn’t Yet Make Him a Winner."},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tSometimes a song captures a mood better than any prose.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen David Ellison was revealed as the winner in the two-man bid to be\u00a0the last king of Hollywood<\/a>, or at least a key part of its hopefully ongoing legacy, a line came to mind: the title lyric from Fleet Foxes\u2019 2020\u00a0indie-rock power ballad\u00a0\u201cCan I Believe You?<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tEllison, after all, had staked his whole bid \u2014 not just of Warner Bros., but his entry into moguldom \u2014 on a passionate but unverified claim. He was the best person to steward Hollywood from its uncertain present to a bright future. He loved movies, he had money he could afford to lose and, maybe most important, he had a vision for how to preserve its soul underneath a suit of tech armor.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut all of that don\u2019t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, to cite one of the more famous movies of the studio Ellison has just acquired. The vision wasn\u2019t proven, the money\u00a0has a way of drying up with nervous stock markets and even more queasy fathers and, if we\u2019re being accurate, a lot of people love movies.<\/p>\n

\n\tOf course in one sense you\u2019d have little reason not to believe Ellison. He had defied odds at every turn. The latest example of that came Thursday afternoon, when, as many headline writers noted, the\u00a043-year-old had achieved a \u201cstunning\u201d win in pulling Warner Bros. out from under the legs of Netflix<\/a> and its Hollywood leader Ted Sarandos. The streamer has had a deal in place for nearly three months, through every Ellison shareholder agitation or Kennedy Center habitation. At times Ellison on conference calls and C-suite letters seemed so desperate you almost started to feel bad for him \u2014 well, inasmuch as you could feel bad for someone who was given an airplane for their 13th birthday.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd yet here he was\u00a0standing with the big prize<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 a movie studio and collection of pay-TV and other assets with a market cap of $71 billion. Of course, he just paid $111 billion plus an extra few billion in sweeteners, which might dampen the winning feeling, like buying $30 of tickets at the state fair ring-toss to win a stuffed animal that costs three bucks. But a prize nonetheless.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd he had done it just the year before too, moving from a secondary position as a financier into the owner\u2019s chair at Paramount<\/a> \u2014 Shari Redstone\u2019s go-to savior. And yet again a bunch of years before that, when he had gone from financing some pretty marginal movies to mega-hits like Star Trek Into Darkness and eventually\u00a0Top Gun: Maverick. And really he had done it years before that in moving from acting to financing films in the first place.<\/p>\n

\n\tNepo babies tend to get little credit, and for good reason. David Ellison leveled up on almost every stage of the game because of money. And when your family\u2019s net worth fluctuates\u00a0between $225 billion and $390 billion (I\u2019d take those fluctuations!) you don\u2019t really have to worry about money. You just make other people worry whether they have enough of\u00a0it. Ellison kept offering more and more for WB, and as much as the win was stunning, it also would have been stunning \u2014 or at least stunningly stupid \u2014 if Netflix stuck with it. The company\u2019s initial bid was $82 billion without the cable networks, which seemed profligate enough, and how much do you keep going. And so Ellison\u2019s money (and the money of Saudi, Qatar and Abu Dhabi) won out.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut Ellison had yet another advantage besides cash. He wrestled on each of these gameplay screens with an opponent who was deeply troubled, at a time that was deeply desperate. Ellison began financing his first tentpole films in the late 2000\u2019s and early 2010\u2019s, when a financial-crisis-shaken Hollywood was desperate for any kind of stable money. He came in to Paramount franchises like Star Trek and Top Gun when the company was feeling the pinch from its declining cable business; similarly, he came in a few years later to scoop up the company (for a suddenly pittance-seeming $8 billion) from a Shari Redstone who had nowhere else to go.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd he now defeated Ted Sarandos, who was Public Enemy No. 1 in both Washington\u2019s GOP circles, as that cringily grandstanding Congressional hearing about Netflix\u2019s trans content demonstrated, and in Hollywood, as every commissary lunch with every agent and executive worried about the death of the theatrical model could tell you.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tDonald Trump speaks about infrastructure and AI to reporters with David Ellison\u2019s father Larry Ellison, chairman of Oracle, Masayoshi Son, SoftBank Group CEO, and Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO in the Roosevelt Room at the White House on Jan 21, 2025 in Washington, DC.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJabin Botsford\/The Washington Post via Getty Images<\/p>\n

\n\tEven one of Ellison\u2019s biggest advantages \u2014 the favor of the Trump administration to bless these deals \u2014 came not because of savvy maneuvering on his part but because his father already laid the groundwork by chumming up to the president, even joining that now-infamous call about contesting the 2020 election results. All David had to do was sit with Trump at some events and maybe rattle\u00a060 Minutes\u2019\u00a0cage every once in a while and he was golden.<\/p>\n

\n\tThese are all advantages you can\u2019t blame Ellison for having \u2014 would any of us in our heart of hearts not also enthusiastically spend $111 billion granted to us or not thank the heavens that our dad was friends with the man in charge? But a lack of culpability is not the same as an excess of capability; the fact that it\u2019s justifiable that Ellison walked through doors open for him far from foretells an ability to jimmy them unlocked. What\u00a0will\u00a0the Paramount slate look like with the Warner Bros studio at its disposal? How\u00a0will\u00a0he handle an HBO still in many ways living in another era of spend big on development and hope it all comes out in the Emmys wash?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tHow\u00a0can\u00a0he manage a CNN whose only feature more notable than a ratings free-fall is how much Donald Trump wants to bang it to the ground? How\u00a0does\u00a0Paramount compete with a YouTube and a TikTok (even a TikTok partly owned<\/a> in the family), never mind navigate Disney-OpenAI and a coming age of anti-original AI slop? How does he handle any of this without massive cuts?<\/p>\n

\n\tNormally a man in charge of all these assets would have done something to demonstrate how successful he\u2019s been or at least a style he\u2019s taken. But the curiosity of the David Ellison story \u2014 or, really, the times in which he\u2019s lived \u2014 is that despite 20 years in the business, there are almost no major strategic decisions you can point to that might answer any of these questions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tInstead we are left only with the experience of other ascendant owners who\u2019ve come into moguldom with big talk and fresh dreams only to leave with a golden parachute and a lot of ruined departments. (A certain current WB mogul comes to mind.)<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019ve been wounded before, hasn\u2019t let me go.\u201d That\u2019s from \u201cCan I Believe You?\u201d Right now it\u2019s the only question that matters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sometimes a song captures a mood better than any prose.\u00a0 When David Ellison was revealed as the winner…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":320480,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[321,93,61,60,1868,3282,12481],"class_list":{"0":"post-320479","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-netflix","13":"tag-paramount","14":"tag-warner-bros-discovery"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=320479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320479\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/320480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=320479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=320479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=320479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}