What Paramount’s David Ellison Is Really Chasing Via His WBD Bid

Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison speaks during the Bloomberg Screentime conference in Los Angeles on October 9, 2025.

AFP via Getty Images

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. has a major launch in the works: A West Coast offshoot of the New York Post, the company’s puckish tabloid that covers crime, scandal, and gossip with a blend of swagger and provocative headline puns. The early 2026 debut of The California Post will likely be the final journalistic hurrah for Murdoch, the 94-year-old press baron whose empire spans the Post, Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and much more.

But while Murdoch’s career enters its closing arc, another billionaire has spent 2025 positioning himself as the next great media consolidator. Enter Paramount Skydance David Ellison, whose $108 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery amounts to a 21st-century version of the same empire-building instinct Murdoch rode to global influence.

David Ellison’s $108B Warner Bros. bid pits him against Netflix—and echoes Rupert Murdoch

Just a few miles away from the Fox lot in Los Angeles that The California Post will call home, the 42-year-old Ellison has engineered a months-long dealmaking frenzy that’s upended Hollywood. Already this year, Hollywood’s youngest studio boss and the son of Oracle’s billionaire founder Larry Ellison has led the $8.4 billion merger of Paramount and Skydance.

“Everywhere you look, he’s throwing money.”

Ellison also poached the Stranger Things creators from Netflix; bought Bari Weiss’ The Free Press and installed her at CBS as the network’s first EIC; made Paramount the exclusive U.S. home of the UFC beginning in 2026; and green-lit a live-action Call of Duty movie based on the popular Activision video game franchise. “Everywhere you look, he’s throwing money,” media analyst Rich Greenfield told Business Insider. “That’s what Hollywood gets excited about.”

Ellison’s Paramount is also competing at the moment with Netflix for control of Warner Bros. in perhaps the most aggressive consolidation play Hollywood has seen in years. It’s a sprint that echoes, in its own way, the Murdochian instinct to gather as many media megaphones as one lifetime will allow.

And it’s in Paramount’s bid for WBD wherein the similarities between Murdoch and Ellison arguably most closely align.

What Ellison’s bid means for CNN, HBO, and the future of Warner Bros. Discovery

If Ellison wins control of WBD, his portfolio of media properties would include CBS News, HBO, DC, the Paramount studio—and CNN. Ellison has reportedly promised President Trump “sweeping” changes to the latter should Paramount gain control of its parent company. Which also means that, should Ellison win, CNN looks like it will become the first major news network reshaped by a mogul who pitched his plan directly to a sitting president.

Turning CNN rightward, even marginally, would also beg the question: Is David Ellison the next Rupert Murdoch?

“We want to build a scaled news service that is, basically, fundamentally in the trust business, that is in the truth business, and that speaks to the 70% of Americans that are in the middle,” Ellison told CNBC’s David Faber on Dec. 8. “And we believe that by doing so that is, for us, kind of doing well while doing good. We believe in that business model, and we believe it’s essential.”

That’s a stance not unlike the “We report, you decide” mantra that Fox News popularized, in its ambition to speak to an audience it decided cable news was ignoring.

Murdoch’s old-school media empire vs. Ellison’s tech-driven disruption

Speaking of Fox News: Its founder, like Ellison, is a second-generation tycoon who’s relished the old-school newspaper tradition for half a century and is now pouring his remaining energies into another scrappy newspaper. One that will meld Page Six energy with a front page calibrated to irritate the liberal strongholds of the Golden State.

Ellison’s latest project, by contrast, starts with a tech-based worldview and Silicon Valley-adjacent wealth. Likewise, there’s an echo in his deal-making style of the “sky-dancing” maneuvers he practiced as a young hobbyist pilot (and that he named his company Skydance in honor of). His pursuit of WBD today feels a little like those same high-flying rolls, loops, and Hammerheads that require precision and the nerve to fully commit.

According to Paramount, Ellison’s as-yet unsuccessful courtship of WBD unfolded over 12 weeks. He advanced six escalating proposals, culminating in an all-cash offer of $30 a share. And he pressed forward even as the process appeared to tilt away from him, ultimately challenging its fairness while also treating each rejection as an invitation to return with a better offer.

In his earnestness to get this deal done, the Paramount boss also made personal overtures to WBD CEO David Zaslav. “I appreciate you’re underwater today so I wanted to send you a quick text,” Ellison wrote in a message to Zaslav the day before Netflix announced its acquisition (Paramount included the missive in a regulatory filing).

Ellison’s message promised “complete certainty,” “strong cash value,” and “speed to close.” He added: “It would be the honor of a lifetime to be your partner and to be the owner of these iconic assets… We are always loyal and honorable to our partners and hope we have the opportunity to prove that to you.”

It’s a pursuit that calls to mind an earlier legacy-shaping bid by a different media CEO keen on acquiring a top-tier asset.

Murdoch’s 2007 acquisition of Dow Jones, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, was a similarly complicated transaction, albeit targeting a prestige print institution. It required promises of editorial safeguards and delicate negotiations with the Bancroft family. Both deals, Murdoch’s and now Ellison’s, were powered in part by family capital—Murdoch leaning on the News Corp. colossus he built with his children, Ellison backed by the Ellison Trust and a father who joined key meetings.

What controlling WBD would give Ellison: CNN, HBO, DC—and Murdoch-level influence

In buying the parent of the WSJ, Murdoch added a crown jewel of American journalism to his portfolio. Ellison, meanwhile, could use WBD—the parent of CNN, HBO and the studio behind franchises like Mission: Impossible—to create a company that shapes what audiences watch, read, and absorb daily.

If he’s successful in doing so, and in outmaneuvering Netflix, it would mark an empire-defining pivot in his career—echoing the same way Murdoch consolidated influence over the decades.

The next date to watch is Dec. 22. That’s the deadline by which WBD must inform shareholders of its official recommendation regarding Paramount’s offer and whether it’s decided to recommend against Netflix’s. What happens next could reshape the balance of power across Hollywood, cable news, and American politics. Until then, all eyes remain on Paramount’s sky-dancing dealmaker-in-chief, who at this point still seems committed to flying ever higher.