How Larry Ellison And David Ellison Pulled Off The Paramount Deal
The merger was approved only after some key concessions from both parties. Paramount agreed to pay President Trump $16 million—to be used for his future presidential library—in July to resolve a lawsuit over 60 Minutes ' edit of a 2024 interview of Kamala Harris. (A couple of weeks later, CBS said it would end Trump critic Stephen Colbert's late night show next May, citing cost overruns.) Ellison's Skydance, meanwhile, had to make written commitments promising that the company's programming would embody 'a diversity of viewpoints from across the political and ideological spectrum' and that it would 'adopt measures that can root out the bias that has undermined trust in the national news media,' per the FCC's letter announcing the decision.
Another late change had to do with Ellison's control. FCC filings from September 2024 initially showed that David's father, Oracle cofounder and chief technology officer Larry Ellison, the second richest person on earth, held all of the voting and equity shares in the Pinnacle Media Ventures holding companies acquiring the Paramount stake. These shares were held through his Lawrence J. Ellison Revocable Trust, the same entity that owns his Oracle shares and most of his estimated $1.5 billion in real estate. Per these filings, the Ellison family also owned 67% of the equity and 78% of the voting rights in Skydance in part via Sayonara LLC, a parent company of the Pinnacle entities. (Ellison, a devotee of Japanese art and architecture, named Sayonara's three subsidiaries Aozora, Hikouki and Furaito, Japanese words meaning 'blue sky,' 'airplane' and 'flight.') In October 2024, an amendment filed with the FCC changed the voting rights so that David Ellison held 100% of the Pinnacle entities' voting interest, but dad kept the equity.
There was yet another change in mid-July. This time David's voting rights in post-merger Paramount were reduced to 50%; his father Larry got 27.5%, according to FCC filings. That means no single shareholder can outvote David, but it also means that he needs his father to approve everything from budgets to key investments. (Larry Ellison appears to control all of the Ellison family's approximately 26% equity stake tied to those voting shares in post-merger Paramount, plus at least 10% more with no voting power, assuming all existing shareholders choose to receive their maximum cashout. On top of that, the Ellisons also own another 6.7% equity stake through Skydance Entertainment Group, per the initial 2024 filing, although it's unclear how that's split between father and son.) If his dad ever decided to team up with Gerry Cardinale's Redbird Capital, which invested in David's Skydance in 2020 and controls the remaining 22.5% of the vote, the two parties could block David Ellison. David Ellison could also sway Redbird if his father disagreed.
The main reason for the change, at least two sources say, has more to do with money than power. ' From a voting standpoint, David Ellison will be in control through his entities, but the taxable benefits will flow to Larry,' says Los Angeles-based mergers and acquisitions lawyer Alex Davis, who is not involved in the transaction. Davis says the changes were probably due to regulatory reasons and are not unusual. 'His profitable businesses could benefit from any kind of taxable losses or depreciation with this business.'
A spokesperson for Skydance declined to comment. Redbird, David Ellison and the FCC did not respond to a request for comment before publication.
It's possible that President Trump's taking office in January also had something to do with it, too. While David Ellison met with both Trump and FCC Chair Brendan Carr ahead of the deal's approval, he also donated around $1 million to Joe Biden's reelection campaign in February 2024. Meanwhile, Larry Ellison and Trump have a longstanding relationship. In January, Ellison showed up at the White House to help Trump announce his $500 billion Stargate AI infrastructure initiative. And Trump told reporters that same month that he'd be open to an Ellison-led deal to buy TikTok, for which Trump has extended its sell-by date to September. Plus, Ellison has promised an overhaul of Paramount-owned CBS—potentially seeded by Skydance's vow to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
'I think he's going to run CBS really well, and I think he's making a good deal to buy it. I think he's great,' Trump said of Larry Ellison at a July 3 rally.
Oracle is reportedly in talks to have Paramount and Skydance run on the same Oracle-provided cloud technology, worth $100 million per year. That's a pittance for Ellison, who's worth more than $290 billion, and earns more than $1 billion (before taxes) each year in Oracle dividends alone.
A s for how David shares in that wealth, it's somewhat of a black box—intentionally. Larry Ellison put 90,000 shares into a trust for his two children, David and Megan, at Oracle's IPO in 1994. (They were three years and two months old at the time, respectively.) If the trust had held onto those shares, they'd be worth more than $4 billion today. But there is little paper trail since. After the 1994 prospectus, the children's trust was mentioned intermittently, then for the last time in a 2012 filing. By then, David and Megan were listed as having 933,334 Oracle shares via their trust. That's a fraction of what they should have had by then on a split-adjusted basis, meaning that millions of shares were either distributed directly to them; swapped out of the trust for other assets; sold as part of diversification or some combination of all three. What we do know is that David and Megan also got shares in NetSuite, a pioneering cloud computing company in which their dad was an early investor. When Oracle bought NetSuite in 2016 for $9.3 billion, David pocketed some $370 million (pre-tax) that today could be worth as much as $550 million.
Skydance, Paramount and Larry Ellison have been intertwined from the start. In 2008, Larry Ellison incorporated Sayonara LLC for 'media production investments' and started pledging his Oracle shares as collateral for lines of credit, around the time David and Megan Ellison were gearing up to start Skydance and production studio Annapurna Pictures in 2010 and 2011, respectively. Per FCC filings, Sayonara LLC is one of the entities that owns the Ellisons' controlling Skydance stake. In 2009, David Ellison raised $350 million, some from his father, to finance a five-year agreement with Paramount to co-produce movies. He notched his first big hit with The Coen brothers' Oscar-nominated 2010 film 'True Grit,' the first feature film produced by Skydance, which grossed more than $250 million worldwide on a $38 million budget. As of mid-2024, Skydance had produced or co-financed 35 feature films, 24 of which were in partnership with Paramount, per regulatory filings. In 2023, Skydance lost $54 million on nearly $1 billion in revenue. (Meanwhile, Megan's Annapurna Pictures, known for critically acclaimed films including 'Her' and 'Zero Dark Thirty,' reportedly struggled with hundreds of millions in debt and flirted with filing for bankruptcy protection—eventually resolved with her father's help.)
Although it's not known whether Ellison uses his pledged Oracle shares to finance Annapurna, Skydance or possibly the latter's merger with Paramount, it's likely, according to Davis. As of September 2024, Ellison had pledged 277 million shares, or $68 billion worth, of Oracle stock, to 'secure personal term loans only used to fund outside personal business ventures,' per a regulatory filing. Regardless, the fact that David Ellison has relied so heavily on his dad to help finance Skydance and now Paramount suggests that he may not yet have access to much if any of his Oracle shares. And while David, of course, will be running Paramount as CEO, behind closed doors, no one quite knows how Larry and David will coexist.
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