David Ellison

Source: Skydance Media

David Ellison

Paramount CEO and chairman David Ellison did not engage when asked directly at a Los Angeles conference on Thursday if he had made a bid for Warner Bros Discovery (WBD).

However in a wide-ranging conversation at the Bloomberg Screentime event in which the 42-year-old mogul addressed technology and his acquisition of The Free Press as well as tennis and piloting planes, he did offer an insight into his overall strategy in a tip of the hat to the WBD CEO.

“Ironically it was David Zaslav last year who said consolidation in the media business is important,” Ellison noted, adding: “The way we approach everything is first and foremost: what’s good for the talent community, what’s good for our shareholders and value creation, and what’s good for storytelling at large.”

Ellison continued: “That means long-term partnerships with talent. We want to build a relationship with [them] over a decade and actually make [their] next four or five movies, four or five series, and really think long-term and invest for long-term growth.”

He declined to comment on reports that an initial bid for WBD had been rebuffed, nor would he say when lay-offs will come to his company, which is seeking $2bn in savings. Paramount president Jeff Shell has said the redundancies will be handled in one fell swoop and not dragged out every quarter.

Pivoting away from WBD talk, Ellison said – again without elaboration – that there were a lot of M&A [mergers and acquisitions] opportunities in the landscape. “We would approach [an acquisition] from the lens of wanting to make more, not less.”

He added: “You need more content to yield more engagement and we would want to be in the business […] of actually producing more – more movies, more television series, to get to scale, because you need that content and great storytelling to yield engagement […] We’re also in the business of creating long-term value creation.”

The mogul continued to give nothing away when asked if he was a better tennis player than Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters or Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, or whether he was a better pilot than his friend Tom Cruise. Ellison has been an aerobatics pilot for decades. His Skydance has co-financed films with Paramount for years, including Cruise tentpole Top Gun: Maverick.

His father and Oracle founder Larry Ellison brought his financial heft to finance some $6bn of the $8bn Skydance Media merger with Paramount Global earlier this year, and vies on a daily basis with Elon Musk for the mantle of the world’s richest person.

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