David Ellison Is Getting Desperate
Politicians and the press shouldn’t fall for Paramount’s bullying tactics and blatant lies
The Paramount-Warner Bros. deal is going badly — for the billionaires.
To the chagrin of CEO David Ellison and Paramount leadership, bribery and bootlicking get you only so far in 2026. While these underhanded tactics may have been enough to woo the Trump administration, the deeply unpopular mega-merger is now hitting major roadblocks.
A dozen state attorneys general, led by California’s Rob Bonta, are suing to block the deal on antitrust grounds, with a trial set to begin next March. Starting Sept. 30, Paramount will have to pay WBD shareholders $7 million for every day the deal is delayed. (That adds up to a $650 million “ticking fee” per quarter.)
The highly leveraged merger already rests on shaky foreign financing and the declining wealth of David’s daddy, Larry Ellison, the deal’s main backer. And every week brings even more evidence the merger is a job killer designed to warp news coverage and undermine democracy.
In the face of mounting legal hurdles and growing opposition, Paramount’s cocky confidence has turned into a bunch of empty threats, temper tantrums, malicious leaks and wild accusations about the company’s opponents.
Ellison, legal fixer Makan Delrahim, and other Paramount mouthpieces are speed-running through the four stages of greedy corporate grief: abandonment, astroturf, antisemitism and assholery.
They are, as the kids say, crashing out.
You’ve got blackmail
Six months ago, David Ellison was promising lawmakers that his company would “stay true to our roots” in California. Now he’s threatening to move Paramount to Texas or Tennessee if he doesn’t get his way. He’s so entitled that he can’t see he’s proving how harmful it is when so much media power is concentrated in so few hands.
As Los Angeles Times culture critic Mary McNamara recently wrote: “If one man can decide, in a fit of pique, to scoop up a huge portion of the entertainment industry and float it thousands of miles away, I’d say that’s a decent argument for ‘too much influence.’”
Mary McNamara
At this point, Paramount’s whole case for the deal has devolved into straight-up extortion of the “nice state you’ve got here, be a shame if something happened to it” variety. “If I was governor,” Delrahim told a recent audience in Sacramento, “I wouldn’t want to lose Hollywood from the state. I wouldn’t want to lose a major company like Paramount to another state.”
Bonta rightly called these exit threats an “attempt to blackmail the state into letting an illegal deal through.”
Todd Spangler
Sock-puppet shakedown
This merger is so unpopular that proponents have had to manufacture fake support for it. Last week, a previously unheard-of group called “Neighbors for Strong Communities” started spam texting people in Los Angeles, asking them to pressure Bonta to back down.
As The Intercept reported last week, the group has all the hallmarks of an astroturf operation. It was incorporated in June by a group of D.C. political consultants, doesn’t name its staff and refuses to disclose its donors.
Matt Sledge
“The behavior we’re seeing is what powerful corporations do when they are losing control of the story,” said Rashad Robinson of the Committee for the First Amendment, one of the groups leading the opposition to the merger that actually represents Hollywood workers. “The more the public understands what’s at stake — fewer jobs, fewer stories told, and even more power in the hands of a few billionaires — the harder the deal becomes for Paramount to defend. They want to manufacture support they don’t have and raise the cost for the public officials willing to stand up to corporate greed. Astroturf campaigns and threats to stick taxpayers with the bill are signs of desperation, not strength.”
Sinking to new depths
When all else fails, the company slanders its opponents as antisemites. This is as deeply cynical as it is offensive, and I say that as one of many outspoken merger opponents who happen to be Jewish.
The latest invented controversy targets actor Mark Ruffalo, one of the leading Hollywood voices against the merger, for daring to criticize the Ellison family’s backing and financing of the Israeli government and military.
Paramount issued a statement claiming to be “troubled when antisemitic tropes are invoked in purported service of a business dispute.” The company, of course, has no problem exploiting genuine threats to Jewish safety to advance its corporate agenda.
Ruffalo rightfully pushed back against Paramount in a long statement posted to social media. “The accusation that I am antisemitic is appalling and fundamentally dishonest,” he wrote. “Criticizing the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract, or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticizing the Jewish people.”
We could have a serious discussion about what it means to have the same family of billionaires vying for control of this much of our news media while also running a giant AI company and bragging about supplying “scary technology” to a regime that’s perpetrating crimes against humanity. Instead we get a bunch of sensationalist headlines that further obscure the real dangers of such an unprecedented concentration of power over fact checking, free speech and open debate.
“Ruffalo is documentably and provably correct in everything he’s saying,” longtime tech journalist Karl Bode writes in The Fine Print newsletter. “U.S. corporate press struggled to make that clear, framing everything as a matter of some debate. Is Ruffalo antisemitic? Are giant U.S. media mergers bad? Who can be sure, really.”
Karl Bode
Jerking us around
If you want to know how Paramount is going to run its studios and networks, its merger strategy of acting like petulant jerks is a pretty good preview. But as long as the press and politicians keep falling for Paramount’s tricks, Ellison and his cronies will keep trying them.
Unfortunately, as the pressure on this deal mounts, too many state leaders have gotten awfully squishy. California Governor Gavin Newsom, gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass have each served up weak-tea arguments in favor of a settlement. But these leaders’ conciliatory tone toward Paramount is both politically oblivious and strategically stupid. It also ignores the long history of failed efforts to temper mega-mergers with concessions.
“Massive, billionaire-owned companies like Paramount aren’t going to subject themselves to the whims of elected officials or even the public,” journalist Perry Bacon Jr. writes in The New Republic. “They don’t really believe in democracy. That’s why other such companies are trying to build AI data centers despite massive public opposition. Bass, Newsom and other Democratic politicians must stop pretending to negotiate or appeal to the goodwill of these mega-companies and billionaires.”
Perry Bacon
Fortunately, Attorney General Bonta is so far showing a lot of backbone. He has stayed focused on the strong merits of the antitrust case and refused to let Paramount control the narrative. Bonta dismisses the company’s courtroom stunts, exposes their self-serving leaks to the press, and refuses to take their bait. He believes he’s winning — and recognizes desperation when he sees it.
“They seem so interested in engaging in the court of public opinion,” Bonta said of Paramount in an interview with The Ankler on Monday, “while they neglect the only court that matters, the court of law, where they’re losing time and time again.
The Ankler
Open tabs
Congrats to director Cristina Pasquale, whose documentary Barrio Television — featured in a recent Pressing Issues interview — is a finalist for the prestigious Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize For Film. Hopefully, this well-deserved attention and support mean a wide audience will get to see this amazing film one day soon.
Cristina Escobar
The kicker
“Mega mergers in Hollywood are bad for writers. They’re also bad for actors and directors, for production designers and caterers, for carpenters and Teamsters and electricians and set decorators. They are bad for consumers, who get fewer choices in entertainment controlled by fewer bosses with narrower worldviews. Mergers are bad for local businesses, who lose paying customers from disappearing productions. They are bad for high-level TV and film executives and entry-level assistants, and everyone in between. They’re bad for everyone except those at the very top — the billionaires who saddle the new companies with debt and profit handsomely from the pain the rest of us feel.” —Mike Schur, creator of Brooklyn 99, The Good Place and Parks and Recreation
About the author
Craig Aaron is the co-CEO of Free Press and Free Press Action and a guy with two first names. Follow him on Bluesky.
