BONUS: The family behind the biggest merger in media history; Warner Bros and Paramount

Chris Spyrou (0:08)

Hey, Chris Spyrou with you, happy Sunday. Welcome to this bonus episode of The Briefing. Hope you're having a great weekend. And if you haven't already, make sure you listen to our take. That is our episode that dropped yesterday. It is our looser, chattier version of the news where Sacha Barbour Gatt and I look at the week that was and what you and we made of it all.

Alrighty, this Deep Dive, Warner Brothers and Paramount have officially merged this week in the biggest deal in media history. Major backing of the deal came from a billionaire father and his ambitious son who have managed to grow their grip on what we see, read and hear than perhaps any other family in history. It's not the Murdochs, but the Ellisons. Today, we're revisiting my Deep Dive from earlier in the year where I dug into what we know about the family, the extent of their empire and what this deal means for the future of media. Here it is for you now.

In the last week or so, one of the richest families on the planet got a whole lot more powerful. If you're living in Australia, there's a good chance you haven't heard of them. They're the Ellisons, and between them, they've got government contracts across the globe, major media networks, one of the biggest algorithms on the planet, and soon one of Hollywood's oldest and most iconic studios.

SPEAKER_2 (1:22)

The dust has finally settled on the most insane bidding war in Hollywood history, Paramount Skydance, led by David Ellison, has officially won the battle for Warner Brothers Discovery to the tune of $110 billion.

SPEAKER_3 (1:33)

Larry Ellison is personally backstopping all the equity that they're going to put into the deal.

SPEAKER_4 (1:39)

Up to $40 billion worth is going to be guaranteed by Larry Ellison himself, one of the wealthiest people in the world.

SPEAKER_2 (1:43)

Netflix is out, the Ellisons are in.

Chris Spyrou (1:47)

Now we can't talk about the Ellisons without talking about the man that sits at the head of the family, and that's 81-year-old patriarch and tech titan, Larry Ellison, or someone that Donald Trump has described as the CEO of everything.

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He's an amazing man, an amazing business person.

Chris Spyrou (2:04)

Larry Ellison's worth more than $270 billion Australian dollars, and he's the founder of Oracle, a tech company that since its inception has had a very close relationship with the US government. The CIA was among its first customers back in the 70s, and in the decade since, Oracle has expanded to basically become the digital backbone of huge chunks of the US government and its services. And that, in recent days, has really ramped up because while the US and Israel commenced strikes on Iran, Oracle quietly announced that it had been given the green light by the Trump administration to run generative AI over some of the government's most sensitive data, including the health records of 150 million people, as well as some of the Pentagon's most classified secrets. The role of that AI will lay in things like pattern recognition, predictive modeling, and also helping with decision making. And it's not just the US, Oracle's tentacles also reach down under. It's got dozens of contracts with the Australian government as well, with departments like Defense, the Tax Office and Services Australia. The company's got data centers in Sydney and Melbourne, which it's actively expanding, as well as a special secure one in Canberra, which, subject to approval, can also use AI to consolidate data and do all those things I just described.

At this point, it might be helpful to think of all of this like a house. Oracle owns the pipes, controlling what flows in and out of the government, but they also own some of the walls, controlling what some of us get to see, hear and what stories get told.

And that's where Larry's son, David, comes into the picture. He's a failed actor turned Hollywood producer, and he's been bankrolled by his dad into one of the most powerful positions in the media.

Their media empire specifically already spans Paramount Pictures, CBS News, MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, Paramount Plus, Channel 10 here in Australia. And once their landmark deal with Warner Brothers' discovery is finalized, it will also include the Warner Brothers studio as well as HBO and CNN.

Joining me now to unpack what else we know about the Ellisons and why some are saying we're witnessing the most dangerous concentration of power the world has ever seen is Roben Farzad. He's a business and media journalist and host of NPR's Full Disclosure. And he joins me now from Virginia. Roben, welcome to The Briefing. Larry Ellison is by no means a household name here in Australia, but he is someone who has consistently been one of the five wealthiest people on the planet. What can you tell us about him and how he made his money?