SQL king Larry Ellison becomes sequel sultan with controlling interest in Paramount Global
Oh, great: another tech billionaire owns a media company – although his son probably runs the show
Oracle founder and CTO Larry Ellison has been revealed as holding the controlling interest in US media giant Paramount Global.
Like many media outfits founded in the 20th century, Paramount has had a tough time in recent years despite owning storied brands like CBS, MTV, and Nickelodeon, plus the Star Trek and Mission: Impossible franchises.
Larry Ellison's son David has done rather better in recent years by founding Skydance Media, which has teamed with Paramount on projects including Top Gun: Maverick, Mission: Impossible movies, and Trek flicks. In a 2022 interview he explained that part of Skydance's strategy is making sequels – to give audiences more of what they already like.
As befits the scion of a family that made its billions with SQL.
Earlier this year, Paramount Global dangled the possibility of a sale, and the owners of a majority of voting interests – the Redstone family – eventually agreed to merge with Skydance. The transaction was structured so that Skydance paid billions for the privilege. Larry Ellison helped to fund the deal.
Lawyers are now finalizing the transaction, which this week resulted in the emergence of a filing [8MB PDF] that details the structure of the merged entity and reveals an org named Pinnacle Media – which Larry Ellison controls – will hold a majority voting interest.
Ellison senior contributed $1 billion to help Elon Musk buy Twitter, and now joins him as another owner of a troubled media company.
The two also share a fondness for conservative ideologies: Musk has of late endorsed Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, while Ellison reportedly ran a fundraising event for his 2020 campaign and allegedly participated in post-election discussions about the legitimacy of its outcome.
David Ellison has acknowledged his father's assistance across his career, but there's little indication Larry has had much to do with Skydance or intends to do so now.
Paramount Global, however, includes CBS and its venerable news operation. Which is where things get interesting, as one of the few profitable broadcast news orgs in recent years is Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, which wears its ideology on its sleeve – often in support of causes its proprietor favours.
Ellison senior certainly has a few things he might like the US government to consider – such as a deal that would see Oracle run more of TikTok, and giant federal cloud deals.
The Register can also imagine sneaking a few references to Oracle tech into future Star Trek product.
Imagine the dialog:
Captain Kirk: That's a mighty fine piece of programming that helped us to escape that quantum diffusion nebula, Scottie.
Mr Scott: Aye, Captain. I wrote it in Java. Did you know Java is the only tech Starfleet uses that was invented in the 20th century? And that Oracle is still around today because it was never bettered? And that the Enterprise runs on an OCI cluster?
There's a show that deserves never to get a sequel. ®