I. What CBS Cost
David Ellison's Skydance Media closed its acquisition of Paramount Global, CBS's parent, in the summer of 2025. Getting the Federal Communications Commission to approve it was not free. To secure sign-off from FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, Skydance agreed to end CBS's diversity, equity and inclusion policies and to accept an outside ombudsman empowered to monitor the network's news division for bias — concessions over editorial and personnel practice extracted directly by the regulator whose job is licensing spectrum, not producing the news.
Larry Ellison, David's father and the billionaire co-founder of Oracle, is a longtime Trump ally and the deal's controlling financial forceSuspects →; Trump has since shown what reporters characterize as a rooting interest in the Ellisons' next acquisition, one that would hand them CNN.
II. The Hostile Bid That Won
Weeks after closing on Paramount, Ellison made his first unsolicited approach to Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav in September 2025, offering $19 a share. WBD's board rejected Paramount's overtures nine separate times. On December 4, 2025, WBD signed a definitive agreement to sell its studio and streaming assets — Warner Bros., HBO, and HBO Max, but not its cable networks — to Netflix for about $82.7 billion, later revised to an all-cash offer at the same per-share price.
Paramount refused to stand down. Backed by Larry Ellison and RedBird Capital Partners, with debt financing from Bank of America, Citigroup, and Apollo Global Management, Paramount launched a hostile, all-cash bid for the entire company — cable networks included — eventually reaching $31 a share, or roughly $110 billion. On February 26, 2026, WBD's board determined Paramount's offer was a "superior proposal" to the Netflix agreement; Netflix declined to raise its bid and walked away the same day, with Paramount agreeing to cover the $2.8 billion breakup fee WBD owed Netflix. Warner shareholders approved the Paramount deal in April 2026, and the Justice Department cleared it in May.
The company Ellison ends up with, if the deal fully closes, includes CNN — a network the president has attacked by name for years, and whose ownership he now stands to see pass to one of his own donors' families.
III. Not A Done Deal
Federal antitrust clearance turned out not to be the last word. On July 13, 2026, a coalition of twelve state attorneys general led by California's Rob Bonta sued in federal court to block the merger under Section 7 of the Clayton Act, arguing the combined company would control nearly a third of wide-release theatrical film distribution and nearly a third of basic cable programming. Paramount agreed to delay closing until as late as June 2027 while the case proceeds; a trial is scheduled for March 2027.
It is not a done deal. — California AG Rob Bonta, on the merger after DOJ clearance
"The unlawful merger of these two entertainment behemoths would lead to higher prices, lower quality, and less content," Bonta said announcing the suit. He has since said the states would consider settling only with "robust structural remedies," and has pointedly noted that Paramount keeps trying to steer settlement talks toward CNN, streaming, and foreign regulators — none of which appear in the states' actual complaint.
On August 24, Bonta canceled a planned settlement meeting entirely, accusing Paramount of orchestrating leaks that mischaracterized an earlier session and "tainted" the negotiation; Paramount's top lawyer had separately floated moving the company's headquarters out of Southern California. An antitrust professor described state attorneys general as increasingly capable of assembling "a coalition of the willing" on exactly this kind of case, with a consistent record of success — meaning the last real check on the deal is coming from statehouses, not Washington.
On August 25, in an unusual counter-move, Iowa and Montana — both Republican-led — asked the U.S. Supreme Court for permission to sue California directly over the case, effectively intervening against a fellow state's antitrust suit on behalf of a merger the federal government had already cleared.
IV. The Man Behind The Money
Larry Ellison personally guaranteed $40.4 billion of the equity financing behind his son's bid; the Ellison Family Trust, which holds Ellison's roughly 1.16 billion Oracle shares — about 40 percent of the company — separately provides a $45.7 billion equity backstop. Both commitments were made while Oracle stock was near its all-time high.
Ellison has not sold more than 25,000 Oracle shares in a single transaction at any point this century, funding his life instead by borrowing against the stake — the estate-planning approach known as "buy, borrow, die," which defers capital gains indefinitely. Oracle's own governance rules bar executives from pledging shares as loan collateral; the company carved out a specific exception for its chairman.
That stake is not insulated from Oracle's own fortunes, which have gotten shakier: the stock has fallen roughly 20 to 23 percent in 2026 as the company piles on debt to fund its AI-infrastructure buildout, even with cloud revenue up 121 percent year over year. On June 22, in that context, Ellison adopted a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan to sell up to 50 million shares — about $7.5 billion — through October 24, a scale of sale he has never before authorized. The filing became public Friday, September 11.
No Oracle stock was sold under that plan, and he has no other plans to sell any of his Oracle stock. — Oracle statement, Sept. 12, 2026
One day later, Ellison canceled the entire plan. No shares had been sold, and Oracle offered no explanation for scrapping, within twenty-four hours of disclosure, a sale authorization it had never granted him before. A $7 billion termination fee sits on the Warner Bros. Discovery deal if it collapses, and Ellison's own financing guarantee is only as solid as the Oracle stake backing it. This desk isn't asserting the reversal and the merger are connected — executives adopt and scrap 10b5-1 plans for reasons that often never surface, and the planned sale covered a small share of his holding. It's noting that the reversal landed the same week Oracle stock was falling, in the middle of an antitrust fight where the durability of his financing commitment is directly at issue.
V. Why This Isn't Really About Antitrust Law
Taken alone, a contested merger with a pending state lawsuit is unremarkable; these fights happen constantly and are not inherently evidence of anything improper.
What makes this one different is the sequence. The same family used the same private-equity and financing relationships to first take a hostile run at a broadcast network's news division, agreed to submit that news division to outside political monitoring as the price of approval, and is now positioned — if the state cases fail or settle on Paramount's terms — to own one of the two or three most consequential news organizations in the country, at the invitation of a Justice Department that answers to a president who has spent years publicly attacking that same organization. Whether CNN's coverage changes under Ellison ownership is a question this desk cannot answer in advance. That the concessions extracted from CBS are the only public precedent for what the FCC and this administration consider an acceptable price of admission is not speculation — it is the deal that already closed.