What’s a billion bucks between friends? (Or, whatever billionaires have as their nearest friend-like equivalent, at least.) That’s the question hanging over a new report from Semafor today, which reveals that David Ellison has had just a little bit of help from one of his old billionaire buddies as he puts together the finances for his new hideous movie studio conglomeration Skydance: Elon Musk, who has apparently invested roughly a billion dollars in the just-merged media company.
Now, to be fair, this is really just turnabout being fair play; after all, Elon got his own billion-dollar help basket from the Ellisons a few years back, when David’s daddy Larry Ellison helped him fund his bid to turn Twitter into the current social media hellscape it is today. But it’s still a reminder that, the next time you tune in to CNN, or watch something on HBO, you’re apparently doing so under just a sliver of Elon’s lizard-like gaze.
Ellison presumably needs the money, meanwhile, given how lavishly he spent to get both Warner Bros. and Paramount under his control over the last few years. (The usually-quoted figure for the Warner Bros. purchase was $111 billion, funded by the Ellisons and investment group RedBird Capital Partners, with just a smidgen of support from sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE; the move has reportedly put the Ellisons into many billions in debt.)
Given that the news just broke (and nobody involved is commenting), worries surrounding Musk’s financial stake in Skydance are hypothetical at this point. But, then, so are big asteroids flying out of space and smashing us all to bits; the issue is that the man has not been shy about throwing his money and influence around to express his unhappiness with how the media talks about him (or his beloved Western Civilization), and while a single billion is not all that huge in the grand scheme of corporate leviathan movements, it does represent an interest in getting his hooks into the media in ways that feel extremely ominous, given how much of his beady-eye stamp he’s already put on American culture over the last ten years.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.