Politics & Technology
NewsOnScale Staff
October 4, 2026
In 2024, Skydance Media, controlled by David Ellison, completed its acquisition of Paramount Global in a deal valued at approximately $8 billion. Paramount owns CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, BET, and a library of film and television content that reaches hundreds of millions of Americans.
David Ellison's father is Larry Ellison, co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle Corporation.
Oracle holds significant Pentagon contracts. The company was awarded a portion of the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability contract, a multi-billion dollar deal shared with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to provide cloud infrastructure to the Department of Defense. Oracle is also a defendant in JJ Johnson's federal civil complaint, Case No. 1:26-cv-00197-RH-HTC.
The Ellison family now has a significant footprint across enterprise software, government cloud infrastructure, and Hollywood content production and distribution.
They are not alone in this consolidation. Amazon's Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. Elon Musk owns X and SpaceX and sits atop a government contracting relationship worth hundreds of billions. Microsoft, through LinkedIn and its broader media partnerships, shapes how professional information flows. Google controls YouTube and the dominant search engine that determines which news reaches people first.
The concentration of media ownership, technology infrastructure, and defense contracting into a small number of interconnected individuals and companies raises straightforward antitrust questions. When the same family or individual controls how Americans consume news, which technology infrastructure the government runs on, and which voices get amplified or suppressed on social platforms, the conflicts of interest are structural rather than incidental.
The FTC is currently investigating whether AI investment partnerships between Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Anthropic, and OpenAI constitute anticompetitive behavior. The Ellison media acquisition adds another dimension to that question: what happens when the same ecosystem that controls government cloud infrastructure also controls what Americans watch on television?
Antitrust law was designed for exactly this kind of consolidation. Whether it gets applied is a different question.
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