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Coffee Break: Has the Ellison Infotainment Empire Peaked?

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The Ellison infotainment empire financed by father Larry and nominally helmed by son David, may have peaked with the shareholder approval of Paramount-Skydance’s purchase of WBD (Warner Bros Discovery).

UPDATE: Paramount-Skydance reveals merged entity with WBD will have 49.5% foreign ownership. This is huge. Will have more on this for The MMA Draw tomorrow.

Seeking Alpha has more:

Following Paramount Skydance’s (PSKY) acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), the combined company will be nearly half owned by non-U.S. investors, an issue downplayed by the media conglomerate and flagged by rival Netflix (NFLX) when the two were engaged in a bidding war.

According to a filing with the Federal Communications Commission, Paramount (PSKY) said that the acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) will be partially financed by three Middle East investment funds that will own a combined 24% of the new company.

But despite attempts to structure the deal to avoid oversight by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), Paramount acknowledges that foreign entities will own more than the 25% threshold but that these investments “serve the public interest,” as it would allow Paramount “greater access to capital, including from foreign sources,” to compete more effectively in the TV and streaming marketplace.

Kings of Ellison Infotainment Empire Pre-Celebrates With Trump

The NY Times tells the tale of last Thursday’s big party in D.C.:

David Ellison, the billionaire media mogul, feted President Trump and top members of his administration at a private dinner in Washington on Thursday as his company, Paramount, seeks federal sign-off on a $111 billion deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery.

The gathering, at the U.S. Institute of Peace, included top executives and journalists from CBS News, which Paramount owns. Bari Weiss, the network’s editor in chief, joined Mr. Ellison at Mr. Trump’s table, and Norah O’Donnell, the former “Evening News” anchorwoman, also attended, according to two people briefed on details of the closed-door event.

Among the guests was Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general. Mr. Blanche oversees the Justice Department, whose antitrust division is set to review the Warner Bros. acquisition. The deal would place CNN and HBO, among other outlets, under Mr. Ellison’s control. Paramount’s chief legal officer, Makan Delrahim, also sat with Mr. Trump, the people said.

…it is rare for a national media organization to sponsor an event intended to fete the powerful politicians who are covered by its news division, and rarer still when it has a major transaction pending before the federal government. Invitations to the event, which were distributed by Paramount and listed Mr. Ellison as the host, described the evening as “honoring the Trump White House.”

How cozy!

However, by Sunday’s 60 Minutes interview with Trump and O’Donnell, things were already much less cozy:

Politico transcribed some lowlights from their conversation:

when O’Donnell, during an interview recorded at the White House on Sunday, quoted from the accused gunman Cole Allen’s apparent manifesto — “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” she read — Trump, who’d been relatively subdued in his responses, flashed a familiar anger.

“I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would, because you’re horrible people. Horrible people,” Trump said. “Yeah, he did write that. I’m not a rapist. I didn’t rape anybody.”

O’Donnell interjected, “Oh, do you think he was referring to you?”

But the president blew past her question, declaring, “I’m not a pedophile.”

Trump bristled at what he seemed to deem an insinuation about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, who was not mentioned by name in the manifesto or by O’Donnell. “You read that crap from some sick person,” the president said. “I got associated with stuff that has nothing to do with me. I was totally exonerated.”

Trump may have been “totally exonerated” (after all, who is your humbler blogger to question the POTUS?), but Oracle’s share price isn’t.

Financially, This Beast Peaked Last Year

For Mr. Market, the Ellison infotainment empire peaked last year, when Father Larry was briefly the wealthiest man in the world after announcing some vapor ware deals with OpenAI (more on this below):

Based on son David Ellison’s compensation from Paramount last year, this is a heady peak indeed, per Variety:

Paramount Skydance chairman and CEO David Ellison, who is in the midst of trying close a massive deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, had a pay package worth $63.2 million last year — mostly in stock that vests over five years.

But when you consider that a guy that resigned a couple weeks back got almost as much as the nepo-baby kinglet himself, maybe David is actually underpaid:

Jeff Shell, who resigned as Paramount’s president earlier this month to “focus” on a breach-of-contract lawsuit filed against him, had a total compensation package worth $60.68 million. The company disclosed the executive compensation in an SEC filing Friday.

Given the scope of the Ellison infotainment empire, maybe that’s a reasonable amount of compensation.

Or maybe not, given that shareholders voted down former WBD CEO David Zaslav’s massive payout for destroying the company his role in selling the company to the Ellison infotainment empire. Too bad the vote was non-binding! Joke’s on you, shareholders.

But let’s get back to looking at the profile of this new media beast prowling the landscape.

Paramount-WBD Gonna Be Big

Nielson can help us understand the scope of the new behemoth, at least on the streaming side of its business:

This chart shows the trends of televisual consumption in the US over the past year, streaming up, cable down, broadcast steady:

PBS also takes a look at the scope of the combined entity:

In the U.S., according to streaming guide JustWatch, HBO Max controlled about 12% of on-demand subscriptions in the first quarter of this year — compared to 3% for Paramount+. Combining those two services would still fall slightly below Prime Video’s 17% market share, and the 19% of the market commanded by Netflix. Disney owns about 27% of the market between Hulu and Disney+.

Beyond HBO Max, Paramount would also acquire Warner’s smaller Discovery+ streamer. And apart from Paramount+, Paramount owns Pluto TV and BET+, too.
…
CNN would come under the same roof as Paramount-owned CBS. That would bring together two of America’s biggest names in television news, although whether CNN would continue to operate as a separate brand from CBS has yet to be confirmed.

Since coming under Skydance ownership less than a year ago, CBS has already seen significant shifts in editorial leadership. It’s taken steps to appeal to more conservative viewers in its news operations, notably with the installation of Free Press founder Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News. If the company’s proposed Warner takeover is successful, many expect similar changes at CNN.

Some officials in the Trump administration have also made their opinions very clear about CNN’s future ownership. In March, the White House attacked CNN for its coverage of the U.S. and Israel’s war against Iran — and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told reporters that “the sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”

Ellison has said that editorial independence “will absolutely be maintained” under Paramount ownership. “It’s maintained at CBS. It’ll be maintained at CNN,” Ellison told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” in March, while noting that his company wants to speak to “the 70%” of viewers who he said identify as center-left or center-right.

It’s almost painful to see the lengths that PBS (and every other entity in the MSM) goes to elide the fact that the primary political concern of the owners of the Ellison infotainment empire is their properties’ coverage of Israel rather than any sort of commitment to “conservatism” or effort to reach the imaginary “70%” of viewers in “the center.”

Interestingly, this is one of those topics that the Israeli press discusses quite openly, see this from The Times of Israel:

Critics view the Ellisons as more conservative and friendly to the Trump administration and Israel than many legacy media outlets…

US President Donald Trump has been harshly critical of CNN coverage and backed the Ellisons, and US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has supported the CNN acquisition.

Oracle’s Larry Ellison, who was raised in a Reform Jewish household, is a longtime supporter of Jewish and Israeli causes. Ellison is the world’s wealthiest Jewish individual and one of the richest people alive, briefly surpassing Tesla CEO Elon Musk last year.

He has a record of pro-Israel philanthropy and ties to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Oracle has also had business ties in Israel for more than 20 years. The company has hundreds of employees in Israel, built an underground data center in Jerusalem for $319 million in 2021, and supported Israeli first responders with fundraising after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack.
…
The new merger would put CBS and CNN under the umbrella of two business leaders with longstanding ties to Israel: Larry Ellison and his son David. Their expanding media empire has alarmed liberal newsrooms, White House critics and anti-Zionist activists.
…
At the same time, it owns a significant stake in short-form video network TikTok’s US business operations. American Jewish leaders have blamed TikTok for allowing antisemitism to spread on its platform among young people.

Skydance, run by David Ellison — the Oracle co-founder’s son — also donated to Magen David Adom after the October 7 attack. “Skydance stands with Israel,” the company said at the time.

Paramount condemned a Hollywood boycott of Israel last year, becoming the first major studio to push back, saying, “Silencing individual creative artists based on their nationality does not promote better understanding or advance the cause of peace.”

Paramount has distributed several series or films related to the October 7 attack, including “The Children of October 7,” “We Will Dance Again,” and “Red Alert.”

Interestingly, the American opponents of the merger avoid that particular issue as well.

Hollywood Royalty Stand Opposed

Despite the WBD shareholder approval, the deal isn’t quite done yet.

It’s opposed by Hollywood royalty for one thing, per Variety:

…a new batch of Hollywood A-listers including Robert De Niro, Sofia Coppola and Holly Hunter have signed on to an open letter opposing the Paramount-WBD combination, citing the threat of lost jobs, higher costs for consumers, and fewer TV shows and movies.

As of Thursday morning, the letter had 4,194 total signatories after launching on April 13 with 1,000 names. Organizers said the list of film and entertainment industry union members, actors, and directors includes more than 75 Oscar winners and nominees.

Senator Elizabeth Warren and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani are opposed, too, FWIW.

Can the States Stop the Ellison Infotainment Empire?

More significantly, the California Attorney General has raised “red flags” about the merger:

“We are looking at investigating the … proposed merger,” Bonta told former CBS News correspondent Scott Macfarlane. “This is not a done deal. They have not passed regulatory scrutiny. There are red flags everywhere. We still have time if that’s what we decide. But we are in the investigation phase. So we haven’t decided yet our formal position.”

Bonta, citing media reports of Paramount’s proposed $6 billion in cost synergies, wonders if the merger will negatively impact content choices, competition and the local labor market, among other issues.

“We see indications that all those things will happen,” said Bonta. “That prices will go up for consumers, that wages will go down for workers.”

The American Prospect points out some of the challenges facing state AG’s who want to stop this:

(State Attorneys General) are in a race against Paramount’s savvy consultants, who are trying to speedrun the deal in a matter of weeks. They are led by Makan Delrahim, former head of the Justice Department Antitrust Division in Donald Trump’s first term, who has been at Ellison’s side for years. Paramount has maneuvered to deliver all necessary information to the Justice Department in advance of the merger agreement. He knows that DOJ will barely even look at that information before blessing a deal they want to see happen. The goal here is to get clearance by April, quickening the rate at which California and any other states would have to act.

The states could challenge the merger even after the feds bless it, but by then, Paramount and Warner Bros. would have likely commingled their assets, engaged in layoffs, and made it very difficult to untangle the merger, particularly for judges who are inherently conservative on these matters. The far preferable option would be for Bonta and company to file a lawsuit before Paramount and Warner Bros. can clinch a deal. That way, they can get a temporary injunction and the two studios would continue to operate as separate companies pending a trial, which would take several months to a year to complete.

Media analyst John Campea posted last month that there are 5 big potential obstacles between the Ellison infotainment empire and control of WBD, one of them has already been cleared:

  1. A coalition of state attorney generals can file a
    separate antitrust lawsuit
  2. The debt mountain
  3. The Committee on Foreign
    Investment in the United States (CFIUS) national security problem
  4. The March 20th shareholders vote
  5. The European Commission and the UK’sCompetition and Markets Authority

I linked to some pieces about the European options to stop the merger above, but let’s focus on what seems to me to be the more serious obstacle, debt.

Ellison Infotainment Empire Starting Deeply Endebted

NYU marketing prof, podcaster and TV talking head Scott Galloway hates this merger and goes into some detail about the “debt mountain” faced by the Ellisons.

He starts with an entertaining run-through of previous attempts to acquire Warner Bros.:

The story of Warner Bros. is a recurring masterclass in ego cosplaying corporate synergy. The company has undergone seven sales, mergers, or structural separations since 1967. The script remains the same: A new CEO decides Warner Bros. is the missing piece of their legacy, only to find they’ve partnered with a high-maintenance spouse who, after several years, leaves with half of everything the acquiring company used to own.

Victims of this syndrome include Time, Inc., AOL, AT&T, and Discovery as Galloway’s cool infographic illustrates:

He also has an incredible dissection of the deal:

What do you get a nepo baby who already has Paramount? A: Warner Bros. According to one study that tracked 3,250 wealthy families over two decades, 90% lose their fortune by the third generation. Prediction: Larry Ellison’s great-grandchildren will never forgive him for providing a personal guarantee so David could go to the Oscars.

While the deal is priced at a multiple of 8x to 12x EBITDA, the “E” is anchored to a linear TV ecosystem that’s unraveling faster than regulators can approve the deal. WBD plus Paramount = 2x the linear headache. Wall Street is being asked to pay a premium for a story whose ending everyone already knows. And if valuation is the rock, leverage is the hard place. Last year the two companies generated a combined operating profit of $11 billion, before depreciation and amortization. The Paramount-WBD combo is two drowning men clinging to each other, hoping the combined weight of their $79 billion in debt will somehow act as a flotation device. It won’t, which is why Paramount’s debt was downgraded to junk status after the Ellisons “won” the WBD bidding war. With his new toy having a leverage ratio north of 6x, David Ellison has promised $6 billion in “synergies” within three years. (Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos put the figure closer to $16 billion, after examining WBD’s books.) Synergies is Latin for layoffs. Additional “synergies” could be found by consolidating HBO Max with Paramount+ into a Franken-streamer no one asked for, merging CNN with CBS News, and going Cleopatra, i.e., selling one or both studio lots to real estate developers. (See: Fox selling 300 acres of its back lot to create Century City.)
…
With WBD, you’re buying a melting ice cube of linear TV assets wrapped in $40B of debt trading at 5x leverage. One of these companies will be worth $300B in 10 years. The other will be sold for parts to Netflix. The second generation of wealth ensures that the third generation … isn’t. Shari Redstone, Edgar Bronfman Jr., and (now) David Ellison.
…
The question isn’t what the Ellisons will do with Paramount and WBD, but who will acquire those assets at fire-sale prices when their AI synergy narrative can no longer provide cloud cover for their pair of overleveraged legacy media companies. My prediction: We’ll see this movie again, starring Netflix, Apple, and Amazon as bargain hunters with delusions of grandeur that involve paying a failed CEO hundreds of millions for the right to fire hundreds of thousands of their employees.

And as to what might be the triggering event that brings the Ellison Infotainment Empire down?

Will OpenAI Kill Oracle and the Ellison Infotainment Empire?

That’s what Ed Zitron thinks:

Oracle is taking on a massive amount of debt to build these data centers, working with a labyrinthine network of financiers and construction partners to pull together the capacity necessary to get paid for its five-year-long $300 billion compute deal with OpenAI.

Oracle has also, per Bloomberg, deliberately raised money using “project financing” loans that are repaid using the projected cashflow, allowing it to keep the massive amount of debt off of its balance sheet. This is remarkable — and offensive! — because it’s borrowing over $38 billion to fund construction of its Wisconsin and Shackelford data centers (the largest debt deal of its kind on record) and said debt will now effectively not exist despite its massive drag on Oracle’s cashflow, which sat at negative $24.7 billion in its last quarterly earnings.

…

All of these data centers are being built for a single tenant — OpenAI — which expects, per The Information, to lose over $167 billion (assuming it hits annual revenues of over $100 billion) by the end of 2028, and as a result does not actually have the money to pay Oracle for its compute on an ongoing basis.

In addition to its commitments to Oracle, OpenAI has also made commitments to spend $138 billion on Amazon over eight years, $250 billion on Microsoft Azure over an unspecific period, $20 billion with Cerebras over three years, $22.4 billion with CoreWeave over five years, and a non-specific amount with Google Cloud.

All of this is happening as Oracle’s core businesses plateau, even after Oracle reshuffled them in Q3 FY25 to represent Cloud, Software, Hardware and Services segments, the latter three of which have barely moved in the last 9 months as low-to-negative-margin cloud compute revenue grows.

In other words, Oracle’s only growth comes from a segment requiring hundreds of billions of dollars of compute.

To make matters worse, every single one of these data centers is behind schedule.
…
Stargate, as it stands, will kill Oracle, outside of OpenAI becoming the literal most-profitable and highest-revenue-generating company of all time within the next two years.
…
(Oracle’s) collapse would only happen after one of the most brutal declines in shareholder value in modern history. Oracle’s only saving grace for the last few years has been the growth of its cloud infrastructure division, with investors heavily banking on its GPU business for future guidance.

Once that story collapses, so too will any faith in the value of its stock.

 

George Noble also warns that Oracle could be a very bad bet for investors:

Oracle’s non-current debt has ballooned to $124.7 billion. Up from $85.3 billion a year ago.

A 46% increase in 12 months.

Total liabilities sit at $206 billion against shareholders’ equity of $39 billion. That’s a 5-to-1 leverage ratio on a company being pitched as a “safe” infrastructure play.

But that $124.7 billion isn’t even the full picture…

Oracle has been using project financing structures (loans repaid from projected future cashflow) to keep tens of billions more in borrowing off its balance sheet entirely. So when analysts quote Oracle’s debt load, they’re UNDERSTATING the actual exposure by a meaningful margin.

Interest expense jumped 32% YOY. Free cash flow is negative $24.7 billion on a trailing basis. The company is spending $48 billion a year in capex while generating roughly $17 billion in operating cash flow.

They issued $43 billion in senior notes in 9 months. They are borrowing at a pace that would make a leveraged buyout firm nervous.

And what did they get for all that spending? They fired 30,000 people.

On March 31st, Oracle sent an email at 6 AM to tens of thousands of employees telling them their roles were eliminated. 18% of the global workforce gone in a single morning.

TD Cowen estimates the layoffs save $8 to $10 billion in annual cash flow. Which tells you everything about the math:

Oracle can’t fund $50 billion in AI capex AND keep 162,000 people on payroll. So the people went.

Net income was up 95% last quarter. The stock is still down 47% from its high.

Mr. Market is telling you something.

The earnings look great on paper partly because Oracle extended the useful life of its servers to 6 years, reducing depreciation expense by billions.

Well, haters gotta have hopes too.

 

Related Posts on the Ellisons, Oracle, Paramount WBD:

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21 comments

  1. Carolinian

    Norah O’Donnell used to be known in some quarters as Noron. Take it back! Standards are changing. Even Tucker Carlson is becoming respectable.

    No redemption for nepo-babies though. Kushner and Trump are at the bottom with nowhere to go but up.

  2. compUTerguy

    Probably way out in left field on this, but i can’t help but think this is just a favor being performed to silence CNN. Silence by way of reforming it into Fox- light.

    Not the end of the world to me because I only use CNN to find out what’s happening right now; the actual news and details I get from my morning dose of NC!

    For the other entertainment factors, I agree that they’ll be sold off shortly after.

  3. voislav

    This is all insanely risky, not sure what Larry Ellison is thinking. He has pledged a lot of his Oracle stock as loan guarantees to finance the WBD purchase.

    Not only are the Ellisons gambling with Paramount and WBD merger, but the whole house of cards is propped up by a pie-in-the-sky revenue from OpenAI. So if (when) Oracle goes into the hole with OpenAI, it will trigger the trouble for Paramount/WBD which may be sold to repay the loans.

    Also, as Ed Zitron has documented, datacenter growth has been much slower than projected because building physical infrastructure is hard. For example Oracle’s Stargate Abilene, which is at least 18 months behind schedule and other Oracle properties are lagging even more. So it really doesn’t matter if OpenAI can pay, Oracle just won’t have the datacenter capacity to sell.

    1. Quintian and Lucius

      not sure what Larry Ellison is thinking.

      I’ll go a layer deeper in conspiracyland for a second. I haven’t seen anything on it in a little bit, but for awhile now there’s been scuttlebutt about OpenAI and other LLM firms pursuing what is essentially too big to fail status because of their status as…the entire growth of the stock market. Gary Marcus wrote about it just before the actual players in question started chirping, and the idea is really no more complicated than “whether these businesses are conventionally viable be damned, let’s keep the party going” as far as Mr. Market is concerned.
      Now, the people who would know whether LLM firms might in essence be financially protected by the US government are, of course, in the US government today. Meaning they’re El Presidente and friends; Larry Ellison is friends.
      If your flagship business is leveraged up to its receding hairline in an enterprise that has no conceivable route to profitability, and you double down on that comically nonviable investment, we have to confront the idea that you know something we don’t. And if what you know is that you aren’t going to be holding the bag for godawful investment decisions, then why not make a few more of those?

    2. n

      Something tells me Ellison is going to end up accidentally falling off his yacht and drowning just like Robert Maxwell.

      Might end up being just as broke too.

  4. Tom Stone

    I looked at Oracle’s debt last year and concluded that BK was only a matter of time, more time than anyone rational would expect but BK all the same.
    I spent some time as the credit manager for a manufacturer and importer (Nady Systems) and made a living collecting delinquent corporate debt for 10% of the gross for 4-5 years.
    Oracle is a classic case of arrogance and over leverage by people who made their money by being in the right place at the right time, not because they were geniuses.
    I gotta say it, Larry Ellison is one ugly MoFo, dunno if that’s due to botched cosmetic surgery or his character shaping his looks.

    1. Christopher Mann

      Ellison was also fooled by Theranos fraudster, Elizabeth Holmes. The guy has a history of risk taking, erraticism and poor judgement.

  5. FreeMarketApologist

    Re those Hollywood “A-listers” and their petition: Variety quotes their “unequivocal opposition” to the merger, but how many of them are going to actually refuse to work for the combined entity, or their subsidiaries? Sounds like just another strongly worded letter to me — and we know those are soooo successful.

  6. amfortas

    larry is rather ugly,lol.
    and, meh. billionaires are a policy failure and shouldnt exist anyways.
    i still cant get my teeth fixed, an emergency need for a battery means i ran out of pain pills a week ago, and i remain unrepresented.
    might near all of the ‘people’ mentioned in this report can just repair to their bunkers and seal themselves in.
    fie. fie.

    1. Ignacio

      Billionaires… many talk about the New Guilded Age in the US (and globally). The ugliness of Larry, in my opinion, is not just physical. A Larry with the same physical outlook but doing a very different job, worrying about his fellow citizens instead of firing them en masse, would look handsome, would be handsome.

      Nat’s post nicely connects dots with this link from yesterday. New but different Guilded Age. I strongly recommend that article which ends with the following: “The world of the 21st century and the structure of American power today is much stranger than that (of Edwardian UK)”. But this, watching the struggle of billionaire investments in the US today, while inequality rises more and more, like in this article, is interesting in itself and how it accommodates in the international landscape. So far the investments in Taiwan chip industry have probably shown to be one of the most handsome ones by US billionaires very much like British investments in US railways or in Texan farms by the end of 19th century. But…

  7. The Rev Kev

    The Ellisons remind me of a past, local billionaire named Alan Bond. He was forever making big deals, he was flamboyant and politicians feted him. But then the economic tide went out and it was discovered that he was swimming naked-

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Bond

    Seems that we are entering economic headwinds now as well so it could be that we will learn that the Ellisons have been swimming naked as well. Not a good look but I assume that their money will protect them from prosecution and if not, they will slink off to Israel for protection.

    1. chuck roast

      Bond is known around town for famously snatching the America’s Cup in 1983 from the stunned and humiliated New York Yacht Club. For those of us keen on the historiography of imperial decline, this was really the beginning of the end…and all for want of a winged keel. The NYYC responded as you might expect…they bought the biggest mansion on the harbor for their summer “station.” John Nicholas Brown owned it. Now there’s a family that attempted to give inbreeding a good name.

      1. The Rev Kev

        It was funny at the time how the New York Yacht Club was trying to rule a winged keel illegal – though there was no reason – while at the same time the American Team was experimenting to see if they could put a winged keel on their yacht. Didn’t help the American case when a guy in scuba gear was caught trying to spy on that winged keel.

  8. AG

    “In his manifesto, he wrote that ‘I’m no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.’ What’s your reaction?”

    #1 Hm. Would O´Donnell have confronted any other President with the same question?
    Or say Mr. Dershowitz?

    #2 What other response should Trump have given. No? Yes? Or even worse: no comment?
    Biden if he had felt safe would have simply said “shut up you son of a bitch” as he often used to do in the past when cameras were off.
    In much less personal inquiries.

    +++

    I had to chuckle over the title of the post after listening to one panel discussion from THE TOWN´s Matt Belloni at CinemCon last week:

    “What Scares Hollywood’s Top Producers the Most About the State of Movies”
    https://podcasts.apple.com/is/podcast/what-scares-hollywoods-top-producers-the-most-about/id1612131897?i=1000763028141

    “(…)Matt is joined by producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Emma Thomas and Cinema United CEO Michael O’Leary to discuss the petition to block Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros., the impact of PVOD and SVOD on the theatrical industry, the benefits of working with a major studio, the Ryan Coogler ‘Sinners’ deal, and what scares them the most about the state of the industry right now.
    (…)”

    I´d love to see how those panelists would react had Belloni asked for instance about their fears that GCC would stop funding Ellison one day if their economies fell over. Or confront them with Richard Wolff´s latest comment about interest rates going up with GCC selling US assets. Or whether or not they have issues over cooperting with a dude who could well be indicted for supporting genocide with his proto-fascist views. Which – lets not kid ourselves – have been part and parcel of US imperial rhetoric ever since.

    p.s. fwiw Taibbi´s expected take on the latest Trump episode:

    The Press Promotes Violence and Everyone Knows It
    Casual lies told by the news media for commercial and political reasons spawn all sorts of horrors, making its phony rectitude insufferable
    https://www.racket.news/p/the-press-promotes-violence-and-everyone

    But considering what civilisational „Putin-did-it“-level of bias Western establishment media have reached I totally agree.

    On this note I disagree with Finkelstein and agree with Marquardt regarding their discussion with Pascal Lottaz recently: The NYT isn´t against Israel. They are against Trump. And all they want is get rid of Trump but retain support for the good ol´ pre bad bad Israel that was always masskilling people, instead of genocide. It´s all about style. And has always been. Before Trump and after. We will be surprised how much of what may appear as too much to MSM now will stay. Regardless who is in power.

    That´s the real problem we are facing. This has nothing to do with the administration.

    I assume Trump once realized he wouldn´t get far in the US being your usual NYT real-estate-fraudster. Americans like “honesty”. So he did what a real-estate-billionaire who filed for bankruptcy eight times (or how many?) could discern as “honesty.”

    As the saying goes – every country gets the ladership it deserves.
    Of course that too is mere stupid bluster. Because it´s an elite view on its fellow elites.

  9. chuck roast

    Yeah, I’m sure that the nepo-kid could manage to blow the entire wad if he ever gets his hands on it. But, it looks like the old-man is now demonstrating a certain talent in that regard, and the kid might be back living his old man’s basement before long…just kidding.

    When I first started coastal cruising a few years ago I found a nice empty mooring that I used regularly in Bass Harbor on Arcadia. There were Rockefeller hidy holes stashed up in the surrounding hills. They have a modest little boathouse there the size a barn. Sometimes, in the morning, I’d see one the butlers in full uniform wander down to the town landing with the royal canine to exercise and do his business. Hook a left from there and sail up Frenchman’s Bay and you can see the many rooms with views of the great-great nepo sons and daughters. Not a lot of failure in those genes.

  10. AG

    p.s. Thanks for providing this excellent deep dive antidote to the usual crap we get served on WarnerMount – not a good name btw. Also it has an involuntary sexual connotation since “Warner” was an actual person.

  11. ciroc

    I don’t believe in karma, but it’s clear that billionaires who prioritize their own interests over consumer demand will ultimately undermine their source of wealth. Who would want to watch Zionist propaganda?

    1. .Tom

      An audience so brainwashed they don’t recognize it as such. Are we sure there isn’t a sizable one of those?

  12. Thistlebreath

    Was at Bronfman’s Vivendi/Universal. Aye yi yi.

    Your analyis is wonderful. Thanks for stepping up.

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