Elizabeth Lopatto, writing for The Verge:

In October, Warner Bros. put itself up for sale, leading to a number of bids. The two we are concerned with are a bid from Netflix and another from two nepo babies: David Ellison and Jared Kushner. David Ellison is the head of Paramount, but most famous for being Larry’s son. Jared Kushner is most famous for being Donald Trump’s son-in-law, though he also got his start in business by taking over his felon father’s firm when Charles was in prison; his firm is involved in the financing.

Netflix won the bidding. Warner Bros. made an agreement to sell most of its business — the studio part — to the streaming giant for $83 billion, including debt. (That figure is a bit more than five times Paramount’s market cap.) Warner Bros. felt that spinning itself into two companies, the Netflix acquisition and the cable networks, gave shareholders a value of $31 to $32 a share, rather than the $30 a share Paramount was offering, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Nonetheless, Paramount announced a hostile bid to take over Warner Bros. for $30 per share, which puts the total at $108.4 billion, including debt. Apparently, Paramount has been after Warner Bros. for the last two years, even before Ellison père et fils entered the picture. But now, it’s backstopped the deal with the Ellison family trust, which includes a war chest of about 1.16 billion Oracle shares. The current offer from Paramount is not the “best and final” — at least, according to The New York Times — so this dumb fight is likely to drag on for a while.

Put anti-consolidation hesitation aside for a bit and take the deal at face value. Netflix is perhaps the only company that (a) is objectively tech-focused, and (b) wouldn’t kill Warner Bros. entirely. This makes it immensely appealing to anyone who cares about art and tech infrastructure. Netflix would let Warner Bros. operate independently, but it would integrate its existing intellectual property into Netflix, a world-class tech platform. Maybe it might raise prices, maybe this is bad for Hollywood, but the merger is sensible. David Zaslav, the Warner Bros. chief executive, is hell-bent on selling the studio because he doesn’t care about art. Netflix does, and it also cares about tech. As much as I’m against the deal overall, this is probably the best outcome for Warner Bros.

But why does Paramount want Warner Bros.? Paramount Skydance, controlled by David Ellison, is not a tech company. It obviously has ties to the elder Ellison’s tech company, Oracle, but it’s not like Oracle is particularly a leader in technology infrastructure either. The big deal in enterprise software in 2025 is cloud computing and artificial inference, and Oracle Cloud just isn’t a competent player in the space. People know Netflix, they generally like the service, and they know it’s a tech company. The same goes for Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure — these companies have proven track records of success in making technical advancements good for consumers. They’re also way ahead of Oracle Cloud. Oracle, at least to me, is stuck in 2019, making (important) database software and really not much else. David Ellison isn’t much of a technical or business mastermind, either: He dropped out of the University of California, Los Angeles, to fund a flop movie.

So Paramount Skydance’s leadership lacks technical prowess, business savviness, and artistic taste. How are these companies, Warner Bros. and Paramount, aligned? It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that the Ellisons run a political enterprise centered around vacuuming as much money out of the federal government during the Trump administration. Larry Ellison’s wealth and notoriety come from Silicon Valley, but his interests nowadays lie in Washington. He, much like Elon Musk, has made it his life’s work to shift public opinion to benefit Republicans, which in turn would lower his tax bill and reduce regulatory burden on his business. It’s a very low-energy attempt at forming a kleptocracy. But this strategy makes it clear that, much like Musk, Larry Ellison is not a tech person. He’s a politics-adjacent figure, and the younger Ellison’s desperate bid for Warner Bros. is yet another attempt to advance those political goals.

Paramount owns CBS News, and it’s become evident in recent weeks that the Skydance merger really happened just to get CBS under the Ellisons’ control. Paramount installed Bari Weiss, a conservative editor, as editor in chief of CBS to pivot the publication into right-wing news territory. These days, the CBS News website is dominated by a gargantuan blue banner linking to The Free Press, a conservative opinion website run by Weiss, with pieces like “How to Win a Pardon from Trump” and “Israel Had a Disorienting 2025” appearing prominently. The “This Week in Politics” section has nothing about President Trump’s illegal torture camp in El Salvador, CECOT — the “60 Minutes” segment that was supposed to cover CECOT was pulled last minute by Weiss — or any other important news story. It instead leads with the headline, “Karoline Leavitt announces she is pregnant with her second child.” Seems like nationally significant news.

The Ellisons’ handling of CBS News gleans some insight into why they’re now desperate to own Warner Bros.: to hijack CNN next. David Ellison is not a tech person, and neither is his father, but they’re both political hacks, and CNN is their next target. As Lopatto notes, Paramount quite literally doesn’t have enough money to finance a Warner Bros. merger, but the Ellisons are willing to do whatever it takes to control yet another American media company. This batch of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs is not a group of “tech bros” — they merely use their notoriety in the tech space to pivot to politics. They’re government lobbyists, not tech people. Understanding this distinction between “tech bros” (Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, etc.) and political spenders (the Ellisons, Musk, David Sacks, etc.) is crucial to getting an idea of American politics. There are really two camps hiding under the same veil, and one is far more sinister. The former sees the administration as an obstacle to progress, the other sees it as an opportunity.