David Ellison, chairman and CEO of Paramount Skydance, danced around questions about whether he would pull the trigger on a bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. But he did say there are “a lot” of M&A possibilities on the table.
Ellison, speaking Thursday at the Bloomberg Screentime conference in Los Angeles, declined to say whether Paramount had submitted an offer for WBD, noting that Paramount is a publicly traded company.
But he offered some thoughts so that “people understand our mindset.” Ellison noted that “ironically,” last year Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zasalv said media consolidation in the media business is important.
“I think there a lot of options out there that are actionable in the near future,” Ellison said. Any big acquisition Paramount Skydance would pursue would be in the service of expanding content output, he said. “You actually need more content to yield more engagement,” he said. “Through whatever lens we’re looking at” the goal would be to produce “more movies, more television series” to get more scale. “From that standpoint, we’re also in the business of creating long-term value creation.” (Ellison declined to elaborate on what other M&A “options” are “out there.”)
News broke last month that Ellison and his financial partners (including his father, software mega-billionaire Larry Ellison) were mulling a bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery in its entirety. Paramount Skydance’s reportedly is interested in making a play for WBD prior to the latter company’s planned split into two entities in the spring of 2026: Warner Bros. (HBO Max and studios) and Discovery Global (TV networks and Discovery+).
Meanwhile, Ellison — in the two months since the Skydance-Paramount deal closed — has been making a series of hires and inking some big-money deals.
This week, Paramount announced a deal to acquire The Free Press, the 5-year-old conservative-leaning digital outlet headed by Bari Weiss. As part of the reported $150 million deal, Weiss has been named editor in chief of CBS News. In that role, per Ellison’s memo to staff, she will “help ensure that our reporting remains relevant, accessible, and — most importantly — trusted in this new era for American media.”
Ellison said the “values” of the Free Press “align” with CBS News, and he said people should judge Paramount’s progress in delivering fair and balanced news coverage over time. “We have to demonstrate every single day we’re earning people’s trust,” he said.
Ellison was interviewed by Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw, who noted that he and Weiss are aligned in their strong support for Israel.
Asked why Ellison and his father didn’t take Paramount private, David Ellison replied, “There is more value in being a public company than in being a private company.” Asked about Oracle’s partial ownership of TikTok under a deal with the Trump administration, Ellison said the questions of how TikTok might work together with Paramount Skydance have never come up.
This fall, Ellison and his management team are expected lay off upwards of 2,000 employees at the newly merged Paramount Skydance as part of their efforts to slash more than $2 billion in costs.
In the nine weeks since the Paramount-Skydance merger closed, Ellison said the team has “reinvigorated the content engines” of the company. He cited Paramount’s $7.7 billion deal with the UFC, its deal with Activision to make a movie based on “Call of Duty,” the Free Press acquisition and Paramount Pictures’ deal to distribute “High Side,” starring Timothée Chalamet and directed by James Mangold.