from the merge-ALL-the-things! dept
Fresh off of kissing Trump’s ass to gain regulatory approval for Skydance’s merger with CBS and Paramount, the billionaire Ellison family is cooking up another terrible idea: quickly merging with whatever’s left of Time Warner.
You might recall that the AT&T–>Time Warner–>Discovery mergers were some of the most destructive and pointless “business” efforts ever conceived, resulting in tens of thousands of layoffs, an endless array of ill will around Hollywood, oodles of well-loved cancelled programs, and a lower quality product than when the gambit began. And it looks like our major media titans learned nothing.
Bloomberg informs us that Larry Ellison’s nepobaby son David Ellison is “looking to break Hollywood’s merger curse” with an acquisition of the fading remnants of Time Warner. That would ultimately fuse a whole bunch of news networks (CBS and CNN), numerous cable networks, and several film studios into one monolithic giant under the leadership of extremely rich Trump supporters:
“David Ellison is eager to prove he can break the cycle. After acquiring Paramount just a month ago, he has now hired financial advisers to prepare a bid to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. The deal would combine two of Hollywood’s oldest studios, as well as dozens of cable networks, two news organizations, two sports heavyweights and two major streaming services.”
This is on the heels of Ellison (technically his dad) spending $8 billion for CBS, $7.7 billion for the exclusive rights to broadcast MMA fights, and somewhere between $100 million and $200 million for Bari Weiss’ right wing propaganda “news” website, The Free Press. The Ellisons are also at the head of the class in buying TikTok should Trump ever force ByteDance to sell it.
It’s clear they’re looking to build something akin to Fox and Fox News, where the lowest-common denominator infotainment arm funds a right wing propaganda engine that kisses Republican party ass. So this latest acquisition would most assuredly ensure that CNN — already shifting ever-rightward under bumbling Time Warner CEO David Zaslav — would shift its news coverage even further to the right.
Trump’s FCC is dismantling whatever is left of U.S. media ownership limits to open the door to all manner of previously unthinkable mergers and consolidation. Those limits, crafted with bipartisan support over decades, were an effort to specifically prevent exactly what the Ellison family is trying to do (create a world in which a bunch of extremely rich white assholes dominate markets — and everything you see).
Most of the media executives orchestrating these mergers are all out of actual ideas. They’re simply chasing the temporary stock bumps and tax breaks that the complicated transactions present. But the Ellisons are also trying to dominate media so they can take a hatchet to what’s left of U.S. journalism, building a terrible Trump ass kissing machine in its wake.
It’s not clear that’s going to work. The right wing drivel market is fairly saturated, and past mergers of this kind very clearly have gone terribly for everybody involved (except the folks making bank at the front end of the hype cycle). However excited Hollywood and Wall Street are about the mindless spending going on, there’s no real indication the Ellison kid has the chops to navigate traditional media’s tailspin.
Recall how confident AT&T was that it could M&A its way to domination of the modern video ad landscape. That ended with AT&T executives running for the exits with their tails between their legs. Then recall how confident Discovery executives were that they could fix the problems AT&T created. Then think back decades earlier to how this all started: the utterly pointless merger with AOL.
With Trump effectively destroying the entirety of media consolidation limits, regulatory independence, and antitrust reform (hey great job, Matt Stoller), this is just the first of countless consolidation efforts between tech, telecom, and media. But it’s still very possible this specific gambit simply ends with a mountain of debt, extremely shitty product, a lot more layoffs, and a whole lot of whimpering.
Filed Under: consolidation, david ellison, david zaslav, diversity, journalism, larry ellison, media, mergers, nepobaby, tech, telecom
Companies: at&t, cbs, cnn, paramount, warner bros. discovery
