Billionaire David Ellison now owns HBO, CNN, Paramount and CBS after $111 billion deal closes

American billionaire David Ellison has closed his takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, ending a yearlong contest that ran through a Netflix bidding war, a hostile tender, a lawsuit by 12 states and a Hollywood petition, and creating a company called Skydance that owns two of America's oldest film studios, two streaming services and two news networks.

"Today is a historic day, not just for Skydance but for our entire industry," Ellison said in a statement on Tuesday. "We couldn't be more excited to get to work." He will run the group with Ynon Kreiz, the former Mattel chief, as co-chief executive.

The deal values Warner Bros. Discovery at $81 billion in equity and nearly $111 billion including debt, making it the largest media acquisition on record. Ellison's Skydance bought Paramount for $8 billion last year and turned to Warner within months. Warner first agreed a studio and streaming sale to Netflix in December; Paramount, saying its own offers had been ignored, went hostile. After weeks of competing bids, Netflix withdrew when Paramount raised its offer to $31 a share for all of Warner, and the two signed a merger agreement in late February.

The money behind it is Ellison family money. Larry Ellison, David's father and Oracle's co-founder, guaranteed about $46.7 billion of the equity through a family trust and pledged to help the combined company cut leverage over time, a commitment credit agencies treated as a promise to inject more capital if needed. Paramount completed a $52 billion debt package last week, and S&P rates the company BB, two notches into junk. Sovereign funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE provided billions more; the Federal Communications Commission cleared them to hold up to 100% of Skydance's non-voting equity, a decision the commission's lone Democrat, Anna Gomez, called unprecedented.

The politics were never far away. President Donald Trump, who has long attacked CNN and said last year it was "imperative that CNN be sold," has a long relationship with the Ellisons; David hosted a dinner in his honor in Washington in April and attended the UFC event on the White House lawn for Trump's 80th birthday in June, two days after the Justice Department said it would not oppose the deal. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in March that "the sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better." Ellison says CNN's editorial independence will be maintained and is keeping Mark Thompson as its editor-in-chief; a settlement with the states requires a News Editorial Independence Board, though critics note Ellison controls its appointments and point to the turmoil at CBS since Skydance took over.

The states' suit, led by California's Rob Bonta and joined by the Writers Guild, alleged the merger would "extinguish competition" for theatergoers and cable customers. The settlement, approved by a judge last month, commits Skydance to more U.S. film production over five years, a fund for displaced workers and the news board. Thousands of actors, writers and directors, Jane Fonda, Mark Ruffalo, Denis Villeneuve and J.J. Abrams among them, had signed an open letter in April opposing the deal; James Cameron and Tom Cruise lined up on Ellison's side.

What Ellison, 43, now owns reads like a century of American entertainment: "The Godfather" and "Top Gun" from Paramount, "Harry Potter" and the DC catalogue from Warner, HBO, CNN, CBS, Paramount+ and HBO Max. What he owes is the question bondholders have already started pricing, with the cost of insuring Paramount's debt moving in step with Oracle's. The integration starts now, with a father's fortune as the backstop and a president's attention on the news division.