With $80 billion in debt and a sprawling media empire to combine, David Ellison will have his hands full with the now court-approved tie-up of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, known as Skydance.
But the opinion of so-called “experts” makes it fail before it even begins.
His quest to create an artistically and financially successful business is doomed to failure because, well, that’s what they say.
Ellison might even sell pieces of it very soon when he wakes up and realizes he won’t be able to make the numbers work, according to their reasoning.
Yet if history, including the history of this deal, is any guide, the experts you see cited giving their opinions on Ellison & Co.’s supposedly insurmountable challenges are not worth the proverbial spit.
Follow their leads at your own expense.
I don’t say this to hate the pundits who have followed this saga, which began when the independent producer who ran the small Skydance studio made his first move by trying to buy the iconic but dying media conglomerate, Paramount, from the Redstone family.
Rather, this column is intended to serve as a cautionary tale, a commentary on how elite opinion forms a narrative even when that narrative begins to crumble.
This collapse began almost immediately, when the so-called smart guys doubted his ability to convince the initially reluctant Redstones to sell Paramount to him.
Intense battle
This continued when he faced an intense battle for WBD with streaming giant Netflix.
Then, after persuading an initially reluctant David Zaslav to sell Warner Bros. to him. Discovery, no one in this chattering class really expected him to convince hyperpolitical California AG Rob Bonta to quickly drop his antitrust suit with few strings attached so that Ellison could close the deal and move on to the media merger of the century.
Worse, with each victory, opinion makers seemed to double down on their misguided interpretation that David Ellison was a lucky, mediocrely successful children’s movie producer.
Sure, he dreamed of creating a media giant – but it wasn’t until the hefty bank account of his father, billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, that the mainstream thinking came to an end.
David didn’t deserve to be near iconic properties like Warner Studio or CNN, experts say.
The fact that his father is friends with President Trump and hired the brilliant, heterodox journalist Bari Weiss to run CBS only confirms their confirmation bias.
We all make mistakes, which is why I’m not naming names, even though it’s not difficult to find out who these people are.
They come from Wall Street, academia or the media.
They can sound like they know what they’re talking about with their catchy quotes and top-notch academic pedigrees.
Looking good might get you that essential Times quote or a few clicks on your quick takes — but not much else.
You might say, so what?
It’s just a media question.
That’s true, but there’s also a bigger problem here: the way false narratives are shaped by biases, many of them political and elitist, that go beyond this conflation alone.
If you’re keeping score, the last few years haven’t been good for expert opinion makers.
Recall that their solutions to COVID, including severe lockdowns, have proven spectacularly bad.
Meanwhile, the investing public relies on an unbiased, real-time digestion of the facts.
This deal has been the subject of numerous bets on Wall Street arbitrage trading desks or various prediction market platforms.
Company employees themselves needed unbiased information to determine who they would work for in the years to come, or whether they would work at all.
Blind spots
Turns out they would have been better off consulting a Ouija board rather than taking the chatter class.
Are the smart guys behind their Ivy League degrees and polished personas just plain stupid?
No, but they have their blind spots — caused in large part by ideological bias — that have been at the heart of our country’s response to COVID and many other stories in recent years.
These biases were at the center of the miscalculations surrounding what happened with Ellison and WBD.
As much as the elite opinion makers (and I’d include my media brethren) tout their egalitarianism, they are an insular group (same prep schools, same colleges, same dinners and the rest).
They are also a sneering bunch when it comes to outsiders and those moving away from progressive plantations.
David Ellison, with his background in independent film and his family ties to Trump, represented the ultimate target to be mocked.
A more self-aware “expert” would know that he has good genes from his father, one of the smartest men in Silicon Valley with decades of experience.
David must have learned something from Dad.
Do a little research on him and you’ll find that David Ellison is not a lucky kid.
He achieved commercial success by producing films (“Mission Impossible,” “Top Gun”) that people actually watch.
Furthermore, when David began to prove that the elite consensus was wrong, the bias was not corrected.
Consider the most recent elite consensus that Bonta would never settle his spurious antitrust lawsuit aimed at ending the deal, even when Ellison was threatening to leave town and take all his jobs with him.
It was an empty threat, we were led to believe, until Bonta folded like a cheap suit when he realized the elites had miscalculated Ellison’s resolve.
Of course, not all elite opinions are wrong.
But if you want to trust, also verify.
Gn entert
