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Journalists at CBS News reeled on Friday as they digested news reports that opinion journalist Bari Weiss, a fierce critic of the mainstream media, would become the editor in chief of the straitlaced legacy brand.
Two months earlier, there had been cautious optimism in the Midtown Manhattan newsroom, according to two CBS News staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private information. Movie producer David Ellison, son of software billionaire Larry Ellison, dropped by to introduce himself as the chief executive of Paramount Skydance, the company that now owned CBS after an $8 billion merger that promised new investment.
But the newsroom hasn't heard directly from Ellison since that day, leaving many apprehensive about plans for the network, the two staffers said. The anxiety has been reinforced in recent weeks as details of Weiss's likely hire - and Paramount Skydance's $150 million acquisition of her online publication, the Free Press - leaked in media outlets ahead of internal confirmation.
The deal and new role for Weiss are the latest moves by David Ellison as he builds a media empire alongside his Silicon Valley tycoon father. Through pivotal deals negotiated or approved by President Donald Trump and his appointees in recent months, the Ellisons have assembled an unprecedented array of old and new media.
Larry Ellison, 81, is the second-richest person in the world and co-founder and chairman of tech company Oracle, which is set to own a piece of the U.S. spin-off of TikTok, according to two people familiar with the negotiations. David Ellison, 42, made blockbusters including "Top Gun: Maverick" at his Hollywood company Skydance before merging it with Paramount this summer, taking control of CBS and its other TV and movie franchises. His father provided financial backing for the deal.
The disruption at CBS News this week heralds the arrival of a vast father-son enterprise spanning Hollywood, television, and soon a chunk of a massively popular social app. What they choose to do with their staggering wealth and expanding holdings could shape the future of U.S. business and culture.
In a media world accustomed to ruling dynasties, the Ellisons stand out for the scale of their wealth and the scope and diversity of the audience they now access. Larry Ellison's personal fortune is $345 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, more than thirty times Rupert Murdoch's net worth.
The TikTok and Free Press deals give the Ellisons a foothold in online media that has largely eluded the Murdoch family. By uniting Paramount's massive audience and iconic media franchises with TikTok's data-centric approach to entertainment, the family could forge a new, interdisciplinary model for the media business, said Anthony Palomba, an assistant professor at University of Virginia's Darden School of Business.
"You have a son who is going into media, a father who is close to Trump and acquiring the most addictive social platform we've ever seen," said Palomba. "These are very smart people, and none of this is accidental."
A spokesperson for Oracle did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Paramount Skydance declined to comment for this story.
The Ellisons have not indicated that they intend to advance a political agenda with their media empire. In a public letter after the merger was approved, David Ellison wrote that "everything we do will be rooted in trust, guided by facts."
The father-son duo has differed politically: Larry Ellison is a major Republican donor and friendly with Trump, while David Ellison donated nearly $1 million to President Joe Biden's reelection campaign.
David Ellison's appointment of an opinion journalist to helm the network of legacy broadcasters Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite has set the stage for a culture clash. It is not clear how Weiss will exercise her oversight of CBS News. The Free Press has campaigned against what it calls "wokeism" in mainstream media and Weiss, like the Ellisons, is a strong supporter of Israel, but her site has also been critical of Trump.
The younger Ellison has grown his empire under close scrutiny from a Federal Communications Commission that has been loyal to Trump's views on the media.
Skydance won approval to merge with Paramount in July after it told the FCC that it would ensure its news and entertainment programming embodied "a diversity of viewpoints" and appoint an ombudsman to handle any complaints of bias at CBS. The deal came after FCC chairman Brendan Carr pressured the TV network, echoing Trump's claims that CBS News was politically biased against the president. Weeks before the merger was approved, Paramount agreed to pay a $16 million settlement to end a lawsuit from Trump alleging CBS News interfered with his reelection prospects.
On the day the Paramount merger closed in August, David Ellison held a meeting with reporters in New York where he rebuffed questions about whether the company would favor conservatives and Trump. "I do not want to politicize our company in any way, shape or form," he said, adding that he intends to innovate and build "the most technical media company out there."
"This is what I'm doing for at least the next 20 years of my life," Ellison said.
For now, that means navigating a media environment where the president may seek to punish outlets and companies whose coverage displeases him.
David Ellison hasn't worked in the tech industry, but he has told media interviewers that he grew up around and got career advice from Silicon Valley thinkers like Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, a close friend of his father.
When Ellison was born in 1983, the tech company that would become Oracle, co-founded by his father in Santa Clara, California, was six years old. He lived with his mother, Barbara Boothe, and sister, Megan, in pastoral Woodside, the other side of Silicon Valley.
Larry Ellison was not initially a major presence in his son's life. His start-up built relational database technology for clients that included the CIA. It would list on the stock market in 1986 and its then chief executive was on his way to earning a reputation as the bad boy genius of business software.
A former Oracle marketing executive recalled that in the late 1980s, Ellison would be in his office at all hours of the day strategizing about his future - and how to destroy the competition. "It wasn't enough that Oracle had to win, the other team had to lose," said the former executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution.
Bryan Cantrill, an engineer who joined Oracle two decades later when it acquired Sun Microsystems, later compared Ellison's relentless drive to a whirling blade.
"You need to think of Larry Ellison as a machine," Cantrill told The Washington Post. "If you stick your hand in a lawn mower, it will cut your hand off. It's not because it has malice towards your hand, it's just, it's a lawn mower, and that's what it does."
David Ellison got to know his dad well as a teen, when he developed a passion for aerobatic flying. His father, also a pilot, took flying lessons with his son and bought him an airplane.
Mike Wilson, a New York Times editor, recalled the Oracle co-founder talking about flying with his son, and movies, when he interviewed him for the 1997 biography "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison."
Ellison used his Hollywood connections to organize a private screening of the 1996 blockbuster "Independence Day," a movie his son wanted to see that wasn't yet in theaters, Wilson said.
David Ellison studied film for a while at the University of Southern California after dropping out of Pepperdine University. He interned at Oracle for a couple summers, but didn't take to the tech business. It was around that time he met his wife, Pepperdine student Sandra Lynn Modic, who was raised in Orange County and pursued a career as a country music singer, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Oracle kept growing, in part through acquisitions like Larry Ellison's $7 billion deal for Sun Microsystems in 2009. David Ellison turned to Hollywood, where he co-produced and starred in his first movie, "Flyboys," a flop that was partly financed by his father.
The younger Ellison's production company, Skydance, was founded in 2006 and took four years to land its first hit, "True Grit," an Oscar-winning western. The company went on to raise $350 million in funding, some of which came from Larry Ellison, in a deal to make films with Paramount.
The partnership has made David Ellison into a serious Hollywood player, making movies in the Star Trek and Mission: Impossible series, and the long-awaited "Top Gun" sequel starring Tom Cruise, a friend who attended his 2011 wedding, according to ABC News.
As Skydance was getting serious in Hollywood, Larry Ellison was undergoing a political shift to the right.
A Democratic Party donor and fan of Bill Clinton, in 2012, he backed Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. In 2020, a Trump fundraiser was held at Ellison's home in Rancho Mirage, though Ellison said he did not attend.
He also joined a call that November where Trump staffers and supporters discussed strategies for challenging their candidate's loss at the ballot box, The Post reported. David Ellison later said his father believed Biden won the election.
In 2022, Larry Ellison began giving money to South Carolina Republican Tim Scott in the presidential primary, funneling $35 million into his campaign. The same year, he became a primary backer of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter that promulgated right-leaning ideas about the defense of free speech.
Then, on the second day of Trump's second term, Larry Ellison appeared at his side in the Oval Office to announce the Stargate project that aims to spend $500 billion on building data centers to power artificial intelligence.
David Ellison was photographed with Trump at a UFC event in April, shortly before Paramount bought the streaming rights to the fights, but he has not personally backed the president or any Republicans financially, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
In the 2024 presidential election, Ellison gave nearly $1 million to a political committee supporting Joe Biden after attending a small Hollywood fundraiser. In 2022, he told Kara Swisher in a podcast interview that he identifies as "socially liberal."
"[I] want to put that firmly on the record, so that there's no questions," he said at the time.
In the same interview, Ellison discussed the blowback he received amid the #MeToo movement in 2019 for hiring John Lasseter, a Pixar co-founder and friend of Steve Jobs who left the company in 2018 after staff allegations of unwanted touching. Some Skydance employees protested the move and actor Emma Thompson pulled out of an upcoming film.
The situation had echoes of Larry Ellison's 2010 decision to hire as his co-CEO Mark Hurd, who had been fired as chief executive of Hewlett Packard for concealing the nature of his relationship with a company contractor.
David Ellison told Swisher he was surprised by the extent of the backlash over hiring Lasseter, describing it as the hardest professional moment of his life, but said he stood by the decision. Lasseter still heads Skydance Animation.
By that time, Ellison had won a measure of respect for his dealmaking in Hollywood.
"Dumb Money No More," a New York Times headline proclaimed in 2021, on an article that said he had not turned out to be the easy mark some had expected. The newspaper reported in 2023 that Skydance was considering a bid for its production partner Paramount.
The proposed deal took on a new political dimension after Trump won reelection, adding new force to the lawsuit he filed during the campaign accusing CBS of biased coverage. The FCC began to investigate CBS News.
Paramount agreed to settle the suit in July, and weeks later the FCC approved the merger, after Ellison's company agreed to change editorial oversight at CBS.
Carr's statement on the approval made clear that he expected Ellison to shift the network's coverage. "Americans no longer trust the legacy national news media to report fully, accurately, and fairly," he said, adding that "I welcome Skydance's commitment to make significant changes at the once storied CBS broadcast network."
The shake-up at CBS News shows Ellison forging ahead with disruptive changes, although his overall plan for the network and his wider empire remains unclear.
"Rupert Murdoch set up Lachlan, Larry set up his son. There's a real tradition of that in Hollywood," said David Lieberman, a media professor at The New School. "The interesting question to me is do they really have a strategy, and if so, what is it? Because that hasn't been articulated."
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