American billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs buys $250 million stake in HBO owner Skydance

American billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs invested $250 million in Skydance Corp., the Hollywood and news company run by David Ellison, buying shares at the same $12 price paid by the Ellison family when it completed its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery this month.

Powell Jobs, the founder and president of Emerson Collective and the widow of Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs, bought 20,833,333 Class B shares of Skydance on Oct. 6, the day the merger closed, according to securities filings. She holds the shares indirectly through a trust.

The purchase came as she joined the company's board. Skydance named Powell Jobs, 62, and former Activision Blizzard Inc. chief executive Bobby Kotick as independent directors effective at the closing, and appointed former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair as an adviser.

"I am delighted to welcome Laurene and Bobby to our Board and honored to have Tony join us as an Advisor," Ellison, Skydance's chairman and chief executive officer, said when the appointments were announced on Oct. 6. He said Powell Jobs "has shown a rare gift for identifying bold ideas early and scaling them into lasting impact."

A stake now worth about $142 million

The timing has not favored new investors. Skydance shares closed at $6.80 on Monday on the New York Stock Exchange, 43% below the $12 price Powell Jobs paid. At that level her holding is worth about $142 million, a paper loss of roughly $108 million in less than two weeks.

The stock fell sharply on Oct. 14 after the company distributed about 471 million warrants to public shareholders, one for each Class B share held on the Oct. 5 record date. Each warrant allows its holder to buy a share for $12. The Ellison family and RedBird Capital Partners founder Gerry Cardinale were excluded from the payout.

Investors have also focused on the company's borrowing. Skydance carries pro forma net debt of about $78.9 billion after the roughly $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which added HBO, CNN, TNT and the Warner Bros. film studio to Paramount Pictures, CBS and Paramount+.

Part of a $47 billion equity raise

Powell Jobs' purchase was a small part of the equity that funded the deal. Skydance raised about $47 billion in new equity at $12 a share. The Ellison family, led by David Ellison's father, Oracle Corp. co-founder Larry Ellison, put in about $17 billion for an estimated 1.4 billion shares, a little more than a third of the total.

Cardinale received about 333.3 million shares at $12, worth roughly $4 billion, on Oct. 6. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, the Qatar Investment Authority and Abu Dhabi's L'IMAD also invested. The Ellisons and RedBird hold all of Skydance's Class A stock, which carries the company's voting rights, so the public and investors such as Powell Jobs hold non-voting Class B shares.

As a director, Powell Jobs also received 33,118 restricted stock units, which vest at the company's 2027 annual shareholder meeting.

Media investments

The Skydance stake adds to a media portfolio Powell Jobs has built through Emerson Collective, the Palo Alto, California-based organization she founded in 2011 that combines philanthropy, investment and advocacy. Emerson is the majority owner of The Atlantic magazine, where she is board chair, and the lead investor in film and television producers Anonymous Content and Concordia Studio. It has also invested in artificial intelligence companies OpenAI and Anthropic.

Powell Jobs inherited much of her fortune from Steve Jobs, who died in 2011, including a large holding in Walt Disney Co. that came from Disney's purchase of Pixar. Her net worth is estimated at about $15.8 billion.

Skydance said it chose her for the board because of her record investing in entrepreneurial companies and her commitment to high-quality journalism.