cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/36870104

https://medium.com/@hrnews1/billionaire-ellison-family-who-bought-paramount-is-now-buying-tiktok-and-warner-770676d1108d

In August 2025, David Ellison’s Skydance Media, backed by the vast fortune of his father Larry Ellison (founder of Oracle Corporation), completed its acquisition of Paramount Global. This wasn’t simply a business transaction — it was the beginning of an unprecedented consolidation of American media power. The deal brought CBS, Paramount Pictures, MTV, Nickelodeon, and numerous other properties under the control of one of America’s wealthiest families.

But the Ellisons aren’t stopping there. Reports indicate they’re preparing a bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, which would add HBO, CNN, Warner Bros. studios, and DC Entertainment to their portfolio. Perhaps most significantly, Larry Ellison has been named by former President Donald Trump as a key figure in negotiations to acquire TikTok’s U.S. operations — potentially giving the family control over the platform that shapes political consciousness for an entire generation of young Americans.

If these acquisitions succeed, the Ellison family would control: traditional broadcast networks, cable news, major film studios, streaming platforms, and one of the world’s most influential social media algorithms. This represents a concentration of narrative power unseen in the modern era. The Billionaire Anxiety: American Decline and the Scramble for Control

To understand why this is happening now, we must examine the psychological and material conditions of America’s billionaire class in 2025. They are watching their world crumble — not in the sense of losing their wealth (though that’s a fear), but in the sense of losing the stable imperial order that generated and protected that wealth.

American global hegemony is weakening. The dollar’s dominance is being challenged. Infrastructure crumbles while China builds.

The social contract that kept the American working class pacified for decades — the promise that hard work leads to prosperity — has been thoroughly exposed as a lie. Millennials and Gen Z are the first generations in American history expected to be poorer than their parents. They cannot afford homes, healthcare, or education. They are drowning in debt for degrees that lead to gig economy jobs.

This creates a legitimacy crisis. When people can no longer believe in the system, they start looking for alternatives. They start asking dangerous questions: Why do we have billionaires while children go hungry? Why do we have empty houses and homeless people? Why are we funding wars abroad while our communities collapse? The Billionaire Response: Control the Narrative

The billionaire class has concluded that the way forward isn’t to address these material conditions — that would require them to give up power and wealth. Instead, the strategy is to control the story being told about those conditions.

This is where “equitable distribution” rhetoric becomes useful. The messaging will be about “giving everyone a voice,” “platform neutrality,” “balanced coverage,” and “algorithmic fairness.” TikTok, in particular, will likely be framed as being “saved” from Chinese control and “protected” for American users. The Paramount-Warner merger will be sold as “creating jobs” and “competing with Netflix.”

But behind this progressive-sounding language lies a darker strategy: use narrative control to manage decline, deflect blame, and prevent class consciousness from forming.

What makes this different from traditional media ownership is the integration of algorithmic control with broadcast media. Previous generations of media moguls — the Hearsts, the Murdochs — controlled what stories were told. The Ellisons will control both the stories and the system that determines who sees them, when, and in what context.

Modern propaganda doesn’t work like Soviet-era information control. It doesn’t censor everything and force everyone to repeat the same slogans. Instead, it:

Floods the zone: Overwhelm people with content so they can’t distinguish signal from noise

Amplifies division: Promote contentious cultural issues that split the working class along identity lines

Manufactures complexity: Make every issue seem so complicated that ordinary people feel unqualified to have opinions

Offers false choices: Present two establishment positions as the full spectrum of acceptable debate

Algorithmic nudging: Subtly guide people toward certain conclusions while maintaining the illusion of choice

When you own TikTok’s algorithm plus CBS News plus CNN, you control the conversation at every level. You decide what “goes viral.” You decide which “experts” get platformed. You decide what questions journalists ask and which stories get follow-up coverage.

The genius of this system is that it can claim neutrality while systematically excluding certain perspectives.

Both “liberal” and “conservative” voices will be present — but both will operate within acceptable parameters. The debate will be about whether billionaires should pay 35% or 40% in taxes, not whether billionaires should exist. It will be about which countries deserve military intervention, not whether the U.S. should have a global military empire. Turning Americans Against Each Other

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of consolidated media control is its ability to redirect legitimate grievances toward false enemies. Americans are angry — they should be angry. The system has failed them. But who gets blamed?

Electronic Arts, maker of video games like “Madden NFL,” “Battlefield,” and “The Sims,” is being acquired for $55 billion, the biggest leveraged buyout attempt in history.

Under the terms of the deal announced Monday, the private equity firm Silver Lake Partners, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund PIF and Affinity Partners will pay EA’s stockholders $210 per share. Affinity Partners is a private equity firm run by President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Electronic Arts would be taken private.

The total value of the deal eclipses the $32 billion price paid to take Texas utility TXU private in 2007.

If the transaction closes as anticipated, it will end EA’s 36-year history as a publicly traded company that began with its shares ending its first day of trading at a split-adjusted 52 cents.

The IPO came seven years after EA was founded by former Apple employee William “Trip” Hawkins, who began playing analog versions of baseball and football made by “Strat-O-Matic” as a teenager during the 1960s.

EA has been run by its current CEO, Andrew Wilson, since 2013.

This marks the second high-profile deal involving Silver Lake and a technology company with a legion of loyal fans in recent weeks. Silver Lake is also part of a newly formed joint venture spearheaded by Oracle involved in a deal t o take over the U.S. oversight of TikTok’s social video platform, although all the details of that complex transaction haven’t been divulged yet.

Silver Lake has also previously bought out two other well-known technology companies, the now-defunct video calling service Skype in a $1.9 billion deal completed in 2009, and a $24.9 billion buyout of personal computer maker Dell in 2013. After Dell restructured its operations as a private company, it returned to the stock market with publicly traded shares in 2018.

By going private, EA will be able to reprogram its operations without being subjected to the investment pressures and scrutiny that sometimes compel publicly held companies to make short-sighted decisions aimed at meeting quarterly financial targets. Although its video games still have a fervent following, EA’s annual revenues have been stagnant during the past three fiscal years, hovering from $7.4 billion to $7.6 billion.

Meanwhile, one of its biggest rivals Activision Blizzard was snapped up by technology powerhouse Microsoft for nearly $69 billion in 2023, while the competition from mobile video game makers such as Epic Games has intensified.

After being taken private, formerly public companies often undergo extensive cost-cutting that includes layoffs, although there has been no indication that will be the case with EA. After jettisoning about 5% of its workforce in 2024, EA ended March with 14,500 employees and then laid off several hundred people in May.

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The plan, which has not been previously reported, represents a strategic pivot by the world's top selling automaker in the world's largest car market, underlining its ambition to claw back business lost to BYD (002594.SZ), opens new tab and other local players in recent years.