World’s Richest Men Are Buying Huge Media Companies Because They Can

One of the world’s richest men wants to buy one of the world’s most influential media assets. It’s unlikely anyone will stand in his way.

Does this sound familiar?

Yup: That’s Larry Ellison, financing his son David’s plan to buy Warner Bros. Discovery — the company that owns HBO, CNN, and the Warner Bros movie studio — weeks after buying Paramount.

And yup: That was also Elon Musk in 2022, buying what we used to call Twitter.

You know how the Twitter story panned out: Musk made an offer for the service, no rivals showed up, and he quickly had a deal. Once he owned it, he turned Twitter into his own personal messaging service, run according to his erratic whims.

Twitter has been a financial disaster (as an operating company, that is — Musk now says Twitter is worth what he originally paid for it, but that claim comes with lots of asterisks), but that’s immaterial for Musk. He was worth around $200 billion when he bought Twitter three years ago; today that number is something like $385 billion.

And despite the fact that many of Twitter’s most high-profile users have bailed on the platform since Musk took over, it remains a crucial information source, for better and for worse.

The Ellisons’ pursuit of WBD, first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Thursday, isn’t a full replica of Musk/Twitter.

But there are some parallels. Most striking is that it’s hard to see anyone else walking away with WBD now that the Ellisons have raised their hands.

Unlike would-be competitors like Comcast or Disney, the Ellisons don’t need to worry about where the money comes from, or whether their shareholders like the deal. That’s because Larry Ellison is the world’s second-richest man — and while Paramount is publicly traded, the Ellisons have effective control of the company, insulating them from investor concerns.

And the fact that WBD’s price has shot up by $10 billion in the last day, since news of the planned bid broke, isn’t a problem for the Ellisons. If anything, it helps limit any rival bids from the jump.

That echoes Musk’s “best and final” offer for Twitter, pricing it way higher than the market had. Any normal person would have a difficult time convincing investors that it was a good idea — but for Musk, it was a non-issue. The same for the Ellisons. If they think it’s worth overpaying for a company investors have largely given up on, who’s going to tell them they’re wrong?

Another Musk parallel: Larry Ellison is also a Donald Trump backer — except that unlike Musk, he has stayed in Trump’s good graces. That certainly makes it more likely that the deal gets any regulatory approval it would need.

We’re not sure what the Ellisons’ plans would be

One meaningful difference between Musk and the Ellisons is that in 2022, Musk was already talking about turning Twitter into something else, away from the “woke mind virus” he said it had infected it. He showed up with an ideological program he wanted to implement.

There’s no obvious echo here. Larry Ellison is a longtime Republican — a rarity in tech circles — but David Ellison has been a Democratic donor, and supported Joe Biden with a million-dollar donation in last year’s election. And while David Ellison has gone through lots of hoops to placate the Trump administration while getting the Paramount deal approved, he insists he is now an apolitical owner.

How would all of that affect the way the Ellison ran a combined Paramount/WBD?

We have no idea. Despite the news media’s (appropriate) focus on the future of CBS News under Ellison, that’s a speculative exercise for now — just like wondering what would happen to CNN if the WBD deal goes through. The fact that the Ellisons are bidding for all of WBD — which was already slated to get split in half — doesn’t mean they won’t sell or spin out some of those assets once they have them.

But what we do know is striking enough. We’ve already seen one of the world’s richest men snap up one of the world’s most important media companies, more or less because he could. Now we’re bracing for a repeat. We don’t know how this one will play out. But we don’t have much say in it, either.