Are the billionaires winning?
Increasingly the answer appears to be yes, and it seems they are winning at the expense of the American public and our media landscape.
I have been writing about this topic in the pages of Moonshine Ink since February, and things have only gotten worse. I won’t rehash all the ways billionaires are buying up the country’s most esteemed publications and TV news companies (see When Billionaires Buy Up Media, America Loses and A Dark Day for Journalism), but last month a mega-merger I was hoping wouldn’t happen, happened.
I am talking about the Paramount takeover of Warner Bros Discovery. The $111 billion merger was approved last month after California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who was leading the charge to stop the deal with 11 other state attorneys general, folded. Observers speculate that Bonta came under intense political pressure from Gov. Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, and gubernatorial nominee Xavier Becerra to settle the lawsuit after Paramount CEO David Ellison, son of the world’s sixth-richest man, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, threatened to move the company out of California if he didn’t get his way. Whether Ellison’s threat was real or a bluff, no one knows, but other billionaires have made good on their promise to leave the Golden State. The world’s wealthiest person, Elon Musk, relocated all three of his corporate headquarters — Tesla, SpaceX, and X — to Texas starting in 2021.
Bonta has come under criticism for failing to secure assurances from Ellison regarding the journalistic integrity of CNN, which was part of the Warner Bros buyout. The only compromise from the billionaire was to create a five-member board overseeing editorial standards at CNN and CBS News; laughable since its members are to be selected by Skydance itself, the new name of the Paramount/Warner Bros company.
Other attorneys general, such as Connecticut’s, were pushing for a divesture of CNN and CBS News after witnessing what happened to the news channel and 60 Minutes, the country’s most watched news program, after Ellison hired far-right journalist Bari Weiss to lead those outlets. Three correspondents and two producers have either left the show or been fired. One of those, Scott Pelley, accused Weiss of “murdering 60 Minutes.” A fourth correspondent, Anderson Cooper, left voluntarily, ostensibly to “spend more time with his family.”
Larry Ellison — who invested $17 billion into the Paramount/Warner Bros deal and provided a personal guarantee of $40 billion — is a Trump supporter and donated around $45 million to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. It’s no surprise that Trump, who is a vociferous critic of CNN and in September tried to ban the network from the White House, is supportive of the merger.
In August, David Ellison wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in which he stated: “I believe that anyone who oversees a news organization shouldn’t put a finger on the scale, especially on matters involving his own company … I do not aspire to lead these companies to bend their newsrooms to my views.”
Billionaire media owners might say they don’t want to sway the media, but facts prove otherwise.
During the latest nationwide No Kings protests on Oct. 17, Meta — owned by another billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg — suspended the No Kings Instagram account for a few hours, just as protests were getting underway across the country. Meta later apologized and said it was due to an “automated action.”
Similarly, TikTok, 15% of which is owned by Larry Ellison, blocked the account for a documentary critical of Musk for three days, blaming it on an “error.” And in a new development, Musk — the man who turned Twitter, now X, into a cesspool of hate and conspiracy theories — recently invested $1 billion into Skydance to help offset the company’s $80 billion debt. What will he demand in exchange for that investment — that CNN only broadcast news favorable to his far-right views?
The real question for the American public is — are you willing to put your trust in billionaires to not put their fingers on the scale of our news and democracy? As Maya Angelou once said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
