The Son Also Rises: Inside the Audacious, Politically-Charged Bid for a Media Empire

3 minutes read time.

In the grand, chaotic casino of modern American media, the house always wins, but the house is apparently for sale. And the man striding up to the table with a mountain of chips is David Ellison, son of Oracle’s perpetually pugnacious founder, Larry Ellison. Having just closed his blockbuster deal to acquire Paramount a mere month ago, David has decided that his new media empire is not yet sufficiently imperial. In a move of breathtaking audacity, Paramount Skydance is now preparing a bid to swallow Warner Bros. Discovery whole, a potential merger that would create a media behemoth of staggering scale and, more importantly, one with the explicit political blessing of the White House. This isn’t just a business deal; it’s a brazen attempt to consolidate a massive swath of American news and culture under the roof of a family whose primary business strategy appears to be unwavering loyalty to Felonious Punk.

The sheer scale of the proposed entity is a trustbuster’s fever dream. It would unite two of Hollywood’s most storied studios, slamming The Godfather and Mission: Impossible into the same library as Harry Potter and Batman. It would create a streaming juggernaut by combining Paramount+ and HBO Max. But the real crux of the matter, the part that has regulators and media watchdogs hyperventilating, is the consolidation of news. A combined entity would put CBS News, home of 60 Minutes, and CNN, the network the President has spent years decrying as “fake news,” under the same corporate umbrella.

In any normal administration, such a merger would face an uphill regulatory battle of epic proportions. But we are not in a normal administration. We are in an era of what one consumer advocate has called “weaponized antitrust,” where the levers of regulation are used not to ensure a fair market, but “to punish perceived opponents and reward ideological allies.” And the Ellisons are, without a doubt, ideological allies. Larry Ellison is a major backer of the President, and the family is clearly hoping that this longstanding friendship will be helpful in smoothing the deal’s path through Washington.

The political agenda is not a matter of speculation; it is already being beta-tested in real time at CBS News. The ink was barely dry on the Paramount merger when David Ellison began his “reforms.” He installed Kenneth Weinstein, a conservative policy veteran, as an “ombudsman” to monitor the network for bias. He is reportedly on the verge of acquiring The Free Press, the “anti-woke” publication co-founded by Bari Weiss, with the intention of installing Weiss herself in a senior role at CBS. And even before the deal closed, CBS reached a “controversial settlement” with Trump over a 60 Minutes interview he disliked. This is the playbook. The strategy is to systematically reshape a legacy news organization to be more ideologically friendly to the administration. Now, imagine that same strategy applied to CNN.

The deal, which would reportedly be a majority-cash offer backed by the nearly limitless Ellison family fortune, represents a potential turning point for the entire media industry. As the old studio model struggles with the new realities of streaming and declining ad revenue, consolidation is seen as the only path to survival. But this is not just a desperate move in a dying industry; it is a calculated political power play. It is the fusion of Silicon Valley’s disruptive arrogance, old media’s cultural reach, and the raw political power of a friendly administration. The result would be a media conglomerate of almost unimaginable influence, with a clear political tilt, protected by the very government it is supposed to hold accountable. The only question now is whether the SEC and the FCC have the will, or even the permission, to stop it.