Politics & Technology
NewsOnScale Staff
October 6, 2026
The Skydance acquisition of Paramount Global closes today, October 6, 2026.
Skydance is controlled by David Ellison. His father is Larry Ellison, co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle Corporation. Oracle is a Pentagon contractor holding a portion of the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability contract, shared with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
With the deal closing, Paramount's properties — CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, BET, Paramount Pictures, and a library of film and television content reaching hundreds of millions of Americans — now sit under the control of a family whose patriarch is one of the most powerful enterprise software and government infrastructure executives in the world.
This is not the only major media consolidation closing this week. Warner Bros. Discovery's takeover of Paramount's remaining assets closes simultaneously, reshaping the entire legacy television and film landscape in a matter of days.
The United States has laws designed to prevent this kind of consolidation. The Sherman Antitrust Act, the FTC Act, and the FCC's ownership rules were built on the premise that concentration of media, technology, and government contracting relationships in too few hands is dangerous to democracy and competition.
Whether those laws are being enforced is a different question.
The FTC is currently investigating AI investment partnerships between Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Anthropic, and OpenAI. That investigation focuses on the supply side — who controls the foundational AI models. The Skydance-Paramount deal raises the distribution side question: who controls what Americans watch.
When the same family ecosystem spans government cloud infrastructure, enterprise software, and Hollywood content production and distribution, the conflicts of interest are structural rather than incidental. They don't require a conspiracy to produce outcomes that favor concentration over competition.
The Paramount deal closes today. The conversation about what it means for American media is just beginning.
NewsOnScale is owned by AMILLI AI, Corp., founded by JJ Johnson.