DiscoDance

Felix Salmon (0:09)

Hello, and welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week.

I'm Felix Salmon of Bloomberg. I'm here with Elizabeth Spiers of New York Times.

Elizabeth Spiers (0:22)

Hello.

Felix Salmon (0:22)

I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios.

Elizabeth Spiers (0:25)

Hello, hello.

Felix Salmon (0:26)

And we are going to talk about Skydance, which is a big new company in Hollywood as of this week. We are going to talk about protests in France and Spain and other places and what they tell us about the state of people in this AI-dominated world. We are going to talk about the way that AI is dominating mathematics and education and what is happening there and whether we are all just getting dumb. Emily is going to ask whether we have all forgotten how to make fires. And the answer to that is yes, we have. We have a Slate Plus segment on Trump accounts and whether it's bad that you can put stock into them like individual stocks. It's all coming up on Slate Money.

Okay, so the merger has happened. The biggest media merger that I can remember, much bigger than Disney buying 20th Century Fox. One of the Ellisons or both of the Ellisons or some Ellison entity wound up buying Warner Bros. The Ellison entity was actually called Paramount Skydance. And so people were talking about what this combined entity was going to be called. And in the press, it was often called WarnerMount. Some people thought it should be called Para Brothers or Maxamount. I was very keen that it be called Disco Dance, because it's Discovery and Skydance. Put them together, you get Disco Dance. And I thought that was very clever and wonderful. And Emily is shaking her head, and she's like, no, no, Felix.

Elizabeth Spiers (2:09)

The Ellisons are no fun. They would never go for it.

Felix Salmon (2:12)

It's a bit like when Penguin merged with Random House. I was like, you can either call it Random Penguin, or you can call it Penguin House. And either would be wonderful, and they chose neither.

Emily Peck (2:23)

They call it Penguin Random House, right?

Felix Salmon (2:25)

Yeah, which is so boring. Anyway, so now, Elizabeth, you can tell us what the final, actual official name for this merged beast is, which is...

Elizabeth Spiers (2:33)

I actually don't know. Now you've confused me.

It's Skydance. Skydance? It's Skydance.

Felix Salmon (2:39)

Which is the name of the first little production company that David Ellison set up a million years ago to finance his acting career, which wound up going nowhere. And so it's named after basically the smallest and least profitable bit of the combined company. But hey, it's his company. He can do what he likes.

Elizabeth Spiers (2:58)

It feels like a succession move, no?

Emily Peck (3:00)

He did explain the reasons in the 1200 word memo that they sent out when the deal was finalized to all the employees, which the memo is like, now the real work begins and also says, we're gonna do layoffs. And it's like, they explained it because this is the mashup of Paramount, basically this very storied Hollywood movie studio that did like the Godfather and stuff with Warner Brothers, another storied Hollywood studio that did like, I don't know, Batman, Bugs Bunny, whatever. And in the memo, he says it would be a disservice to do like a mashup kind of name to both of those storied iconic brands. So instead of messing with their names by doing a mashup along the lines of disco dance or whatever, they're just calling it this other name and leaving those names also there. Does that make sense? Is that something?

Felix Salmon (3:49)

It's a bit like alphabet and meta. You just give the hold co sub meaningless name and then the brands remain.

Emily Peck (3:56)

Yeah, exactly. They did that at, remember when I worked at Verizon, you guys, do you remember?

Elizabeth Spiers (4:01)

I can remember.

Felix Salmon (4:02)

It was called Oath or something?

Emily Peck (4:04)

Oath, yes. Verizon Media had bought Yahoo, AOL, Huffington Post, da-da-da-da-da. They decided to call it Oath for a hot minute, for a year, and we were like, okay.

Elizabeth Spiers (4:16)

It's kind of a creepy holding company name.

Felix Salmon (4:20)

It's better than Tronc.

Elizabeth Spiers (4:21)

Tronc, yes, that's another one.

Emily Peck (4:23)

So this is like very, yeah, there's a storied history of weird hold co-names and it doesn't often go well, but at least Skydance was a name that they didn't just pluck out of thin air from marketing executives is just this Neppo Baby's brand name thingy that he did.