Photo-Illustration: Eddie Guy; Photos: Getty Images
This article was featured in New York’s One Great Story newsletter. Sign up here.
One weekend in 2006, Dean Devlin, a movie producer, was driving across Los Angeles to deal with an emergency. His new movie, Flyboys, had opened that weekend to reviews so bad that one of the stars had abruptly checked into the hospital. On his way to visit the actor, another potential crisis appeared on his phone. “I was terrified when the phone rang and it was Larry Ellison,” Devlin said.
Devlin had made a name for himself with a string of blockbusters in the 1990s — Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla — but he’d struggled to come up with the money to make Flyboys, a script about a band of World War I fighter pilots. Then, in a stroke of luck, he learned that Ellison, the founder of Oracle and one of the world’s richest men, had a college-age son named David who was not only trying to break into Hollywood but was also an amateur pilot. David even had a nascent film-production company with an aerial name: Skydance. Larry agreed to help fund the movie, which cost $60 million, and Skydance was listed as a producer. David, meanwhile, got a plum role, alongside James Franco, as a pilot named Eddie who can’t shoot straight. “Come on, Eddie,” David says to himself in the climactic fight scene. “Do something right.”
Devlin thought he knew why Larry was calling. Flyboys had bombed at the box office, and Larry stood to lose millions. As it turned out, Larry wasn’t all that stressed about the money; he had spent tens of millions more just trying to win a sailing race. He was, however, concerned about his son — the actor in the hospital. The reaction to Flyboys had so unsettled David that he was experiencing an episode of atrial fibrillation; doctors had to shock his heart back into rhythm. “He was thinking that whole weekend, I just lost my dad a bunch of money,” Devlin said. “He was upset about letting his father down.” Larry told Devlin to make sure David knew he was still proud of him.
David Ellison, Larry Ellison: Flyboys
See All
Flyboys was the humble beginning of the Ellison family’s adventures in Hollywood. After giving up on acting, David spent more than a decade building Skydance into a player in the blockbuster business, financing such hits as Top Gun: Maverick and the Mission: Impossible series along with a number of largely forgettable movies. He was, in other words, a producer much like many others in town. Then, last year, David’s father put up billions to help him buy Paramount, one of Hollywood’s legendary movie studios and a company more than ten times the size of Skydance. This past fall, the Ellisons set their sights on an even bigger prize: Warner Bros. Discovery.
At 43, David is now the first millennial to control a major Hollywood studio. While running Skydance, he’d built a reputation as someone with an earnest love for the kinds of action-packed blockbuster movies he adored as a kid and the money to actually make them. But his pursuit of Paramount and now Warner Bros. has revealed an empire-building streak in line with his father, who is currently the fifth-wealthiest person in the world. It’s possible to sum up the divergent fortunes of the tech and entertainment industries over the past 20 years in the simple fact that when Flyboys came out in 2006, Larry was worth around $18 billion and couldn’t afford Paramount, which was valued at $22 billion. By last year, the $6 billion Larry spent to help David buy the company barely made a dent in his fortune, which briefly peaked in September at close to $400 billion.
Oracle, Larry’s company, is the world’s most boring tech giant, selling the database software that powers practically every large organization in the world. But Larry has long harbored more globe-spanning ambitions. Even before starting Oracle, he dreamed up a giant conglomerate he would someday build called Universal Titanic Octopus. (Today, he keeps some of his wealth, which includes 98 percent of a Hawaiian island, in an entity called Octopus Holdings LP.) In the past year, Oracle has become central to the artificial-intelligence boom, providing back-end computing power for OpenAI and others looking to build the LLMs of the future. In September, after Oracle reported a potential windfall of AI-infused revenue, its stock shot up so much that Larry’s net worth increased by $89 billion in a single day. Later this month, the company is also set to acquire a stake in the American version of TikTok. All of that combined with David’s ownership of one and perhaps two major studios, as well as one and perhaps two major news networks — Paramount owns CBS, and Warner owns CNN — has spurred concerns that the suddenly omnipresent Ellisons are building an empire that could dwarf even the Murdochs’.
What the Ellisons want with their conglomerate, individually and together, will affect the future of what appears on all kinds of screens. And the relationship between father and son has provoked no shortage of psychoanalysis. Larry divorced David’s mother when he was young, and the two became close only as David grew older and especially once he got into business. David has always struck many people as his father’s opposite: shy and competent, not a bombastic world-conquering visionary. “David’s ambition was initially as humble as making movies he likes,” an executive who knows David said. “But the current climate has thrown him together with his father and shown him a path to something greater.”
If he can pull it off. Last month, the Warner board spurned the Ellisons’ and Paramount’s offer and agreed to sell its movie-and-TV studio and the HBO Max service to Netflix, creating a potential streaming colossus. The Ellisons have continued to argue that their offer for all of Warner Bros., including its cable networks, is superior. They are currently attempting a hostile takeover and trying to persuade Warner Bros. shareholders to accept Paramount’s offer instead. The battle is expected to extend well into 2026. Some observers believe that acquiring Warner Bros. is in fact critical to Paramount’s survival. Either way, now that he has made his move to become one of the industry’s leading moguls, David Ellison is faced with proving to a skeptical Hollywood that he is up to the task. “David’s mentors are Steve Jobs and David Geffen and obviously his dad — those guys are ruthless killers, single-minded people with a different DNA,” a former Skydance employee who worked closely with David told me. “David is a smart dude who is reasonably shrewd, but he is not that.” During the Warner Bros. auction, the company gave code names to each of its suitors: Netflix was Noble and Comcast was Charm. Paramount was given the name Prince.
One of the reasons David Ellison loves blockbuster movies is the way in which a spectacle can contain a more intimate story — how a battle for intergalactic peace or control of an empire can really be a story about a family. He has often described the formative experience of seeing Terminator 2: Judgment Day as a child. The fate of humanity was at stake, but what David remembers is Arnold Schwarzenegger rampaging across the screen to protect a young boy who never knew his father. “That movie is very much a father-son dynamic,” David said in 2015, when he and Skydance were releasing a Terminator sequel of their own. At the end of Terminator 2, when Schwarzenegger sacrifices himself in a vat of molten steel in front of the boy, 8-year-old David started to cry.
Larry wasn’t around much when David was a kid, one of the only similarities in their very different childhoods. Larry was born in New York City in 1944 to an unwed teenage mother, who gave him up for adoption at 9 months old. His adopted father, Louis Ellison, was a Russian immigrant who took his last name at Ellis Island, and a foundational part of the Larry Ellison story is that Louis regularly told Larry he would never amount to anything. As a result, Larry likes to say that he “had all the disadvantages necessary for success,” and colleagues at Oracle got the sense that Larry’s seemingly endless ambition came partly from a desire to prove himself to his adopted father. “I’m not sure I would recommend that everyone raise their children like this,” Larry said later. “But it certainly worked.”
David’s mother, Barbara Boothe, was Oracle’s tenth employee and Larry’s third wife. They divorced shortly after David’s 3rd birthday and right after his sister, Megan, was born. (When Larry and his first wife tried couples counseling to save their marriage, Larry told the therapist that the very idea of love eluded him: “I don’t understand love. I don’t understand people bonding to one another. What is it?”) Larry said that he spent “obligatory weekends with the kids” and seemed to realize only later that a family was something he wanted. One night after their divorce, Larry called Boothe to say he was lonely. “You’re never alone because you have the kids. You always have a body,” Larry said. “I’m here all by myself.”
David credits his love of movies to his mother. The family had a collection of 3,000 VHS tapes, and David’s ideal day as a child was to watch the Star Wars trilogy or all the Rocky movies back-to-back. Barbara took the kids to the movie theater almost every weekend; Larry joined them when he could, but growing Oracle often kept him away. (His professional and personal lives also sometimes mixed: At one point, Larry was dating three Oracle employees at the same time.) It wasn’t until David became a teenager, and he and Larry started taking flying lessons together, that they grew close, eventually staging mock dogfights over the Pacific. David went on to compete as an aerobatic pilot — whipping barrel rolls, flying at 300 mph just 15 feet above the ground, and pulling off his signature move: the Dave-o-lator.
After graduating from high school in 2001, David went to Pepperdine University as a prospective business major, hated it, and transferred to film school at USC. He commuted from the beach in Malibu, where he lived in one of the many homes Larry had purchased there on a $65 million buying spree; his neighbors included Jennifer Aniston, who was renting one of Larry’s other houses. For his senior thesis, David wrote, directed, and starred in a thriller called When All Else Fails, in which he plays a billionaire’s son who has to rescue his diabetic girlfriend from kidnappers before her insulin runs out. His girlfriend at the time, who was diabetic, played the part. According to people who worked on the production, David was respectful and eager to learn, if a bit oblivious of the ways in which he wasn’t making an ordinary student film. The budget was close to $100,000, and he shot part of it in one of his father’s giant homes in the Bay Area. When they ran out of film, David offered to fly his plane to Los Angeles to pick some up.
David in Hole in One, 2009 (right).
Photo: Universal Pictures
Instead of graduating, David left USC to film Flyboys. He worked with an acting coach to prepare, but his performance didn’t do any favors to a mediocre script. David spent the next several years going to auditions and landed a few more roles from Devlin, the Flyboys producer. He played a bumbling assistant to a corrupt mayor on a TNT show and a shirtless drug addict who punches an FBI agent before leaping from the second floor of a motel in a TV movie. His most significant screen time came in a raunchy 2009 comedy called Hole in One, in which he plays the owner of a golf-apparel company whose partner loses a bet that leads two nefarious plastic surgeons to give him breast implants, sending David’s character on a quest to drum up enough money to help him get them removed. (He delivers one of his first lines in the movie after a woman takes off her shirt: “That was pimp.”) His acting career more or less came to an end a few years later, after he wrote a script called Northern Lights about a pilot friend of his who had died. Taylor Lautner signed on to play the lead but dropped out after finding out David had written a role for himself.
While David inherited a love for movies from his mother, it became clear that if he wanted to stay in the business, he’d need to think more like his father. “David wanted to be an actor, and when that didn’t work, he was like, ‘If I’m not gonna be on the screen, I’m gonna be the biggest guy in the room,’” a person who knew him at the time told me. Larry’s friend David Geffen introduced David to Skip Brittenham, a legendary Hollywood lawyer who had represented Pixar, which was co-founded by Steve Jobs, who was Larry’s best friend. Brittenham helped David make a business plan for building a production company and learn to navigate the web of agencies, producers, and studios in Hollywood.
David wanted Skydance to make the type of movies he loved — “movies with explosions,” according to Andy Kessler, an investor who worked with David to raise money for Skydance early on. “He swore to me: No rom-coms. No touchy-feely emotional Oscar bait,” Kessler later wrote. But funding the Hollywood dreams of the 25-year-old failed-actor son of one of the world’s richest men was a tough sell to investors, according to Kessler. And Larry ultimately made the point moot. In 2010, he stepped in to provide almost all of the initial $150 million David was trying to raise, according to multiple people with knowledge of the company’s finances.
Their timing was good. Late-aughts Hollywood was roiled by the financial crisis, and Paramount, the studio behind The Godfather and Titanic, was the struggling moviemaking arm of the Redstone family’s Viacom cable-TV empire. Deutsche Bank had bailed on an agreement to fund Paramount’s movies, and the studio needed cash. When Larry’s funding for Skydance came through, David signed a deal to co-finance Paramount’s movies, which meant he would help fund production in exchange for a share of the profits. (David had initially considered partnering instead with Relativity Media, which later collapsed in a fiery bankruptcy.) While co-financiers often get stuck funding risky projects, Paramount’s desperate state opened the door for David to negotiate his involvement in some of the studio’s biggest franchises, like Star Trek and Mission: Impossible. The first feature film David backed — a Coen brothers remake of the western True Grit — went on to make $250 million and earn ten Oscar nominations. His sister, Megan, followed him into the industry, co-financing True Grit and launching her own company, Annapurna Pictures.
The Skydance thesis, according to a person who worked closely with David, was that Hollywood wasn’t prepared for the overwhelming economic force of a Silicon Valley billionaire throwing around his wealth and ambition. Plenty of dumb money came into town, but producers and talent mostly viewed it as something to take advantage of. “Money in Hollywood is not appreciated,” the person said. “This was an opportunity to reverse that — to make Hollywood treat money with respect.” Shortly after signing the deal with Paramount in 2009, a person who knew David then said that he had declared, “We’re going to buy Paramount one day.”
David proved to be a savvy enough operator, negotiating better terms with Paramount when his deal came up for renewal and working hard to pick up the quirks of a job that involved everything from managing the egos of talent to negotiating debt facilities with JPMorgan. He would sometimes tell colleagues about an instructive conversation he’d had years earlier about running a company in Hollywood. At the premiere of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise, he walked up to congratulate David Geffen, who had produced the movie through his company DreamWorks. As David told it, Geffen shook his head. “Steve is getting paid. Tom is getting paid. How much do you think DreamWorks is getting paid?” Geffen said. He held his hand up in the shape of a zero. DreamWorks was making a relative pittance on the movie, an early lesson in the confusing economics of the business, where a poorly structured deal could mean even a hit might generate little for the company that produced it. “It was always in the back of David’s mind: On Minority Report, everybody got paid except for DreamWorks,” a former Skydance executive said.
Despite some of the hits Skydance was involved in, a few of the company’s movies underperformed, and people familiar with its finances told me that, at various points, it needed additional funding to keep operating. But David had reason to be confident. After some box-office disappointments of the kind that might scuttle another young production company, several Skydance employees remember David telling the team not to worry if they got into financial trouble. He was careful not to invoke his father, but the employees knew what he meant.
Larry, Megan, and David at the premiere of Terminator Genisys.
Photo: Lester Cohen/WireImage/2015 Lester Cohen
It’s easy to paint David Ellison as a nepo baby. He is tall and blond and has what John Oliver recently described as “resting ‘just checked into the White Lotus’ face.” He built a collection of outrageous sports cars — Ferraris, Lamborghinis, one of the first Cybertrucks — and has spent money on vanity projects, including a now-defunct clothing brand he started with a friend in 2014 called the Lanai Collection, after his father’s Hawaiian island, that sold $165 shorts and $295 hoodies.
But everyone I spoke to, even those skeptical of David’s rise, admit he has worked hard to beat the charge that he’s merely an extension of his father’s checkbook. At Skydance, David got to work early and stayed late, wasn’t on the Hollywood party circuit, and, unlike some executives, actually read scripts. Given his father’s reputation for brashness, many people told me they were surprised by how nice David is. “It’s almost weird that he’s so decent,” one Hollywood executive told me. (The Ellisons declined to participate in this story, and pretty much everyone I spoke to requested anonymity to discuss them.) Multiple Skydance employees observed, unprompted, how close David seems to be with his wife, who has been with him since Flyboys and with whom he now has two young children; according to a person who knows him, he gave up the sports cars after becoming a father. This is a contrast to Larry, who got pulled over on his Hawaiian island a few years back for speeding in his neon orange Corvette and has had so many marriages that the New York Times published a disclaimer last year that it couldn’t offer a definitive count — it’s either five or six. Larry recently told Gary Kennedy, an old colleague at Oracle, that what most impressed him about his son was the fact that he had “managed to avoid the excesses of Hollywood.”
David and Larry are different in other ways. Steve Jobs called Larry, whose bravado is legendary in Silicon Valley, “the outrageous-CEO poster child.” “Sometimes I feel like I work for Mephistopheles,” an Oracle employee once quipped after watching Larry hold court in front of a crowd. David, meanwhile, often comes across to colleagues as awkward and robotic. Since taking over Paramount, the most rousing motivation David has been able to offer new employees is an encouragement to adopt the mantra “Let’s fucking go,” which prompted some employees to sign their emails “LFG.”
Larry never had much interest in moviemaking. He got annoyed in the early 1990s by how many times Jobs asked him to watch rough cuts of a movie he and his company Pixar were making called Toy Story. “It eventually became a form of torture,” Larry said. “I’d go over there and see the latest 10 percent improvement.” David, meanwhile, loved it all — hanging around the writers’ room for the Terminator sequel Skydance was making, figuring out how to fix the messy third act of Brad Pitt’s World War Z. David surprised others in Hollywood by how often he referred to himself as a “filmmaker” despite the fact that he had not directed a movie since college.
Still, his instincts were closer to an executive’s than an auteur’s. “David’s point of view is that if you are a box-office success, that is the indicator of the quality of the film — that is something he has said,” a Skydance executive told me. David told employees that he wanted every movie or show they made to have the biggest commitment possible from a studio — the budget, the fee, multiple seasons. The goal was to feed the sense that Skydance was serious. “He would say, ‘Chris Pratt is a big star — let’s get him in a big action movie, and it’s gonna be big because it cost $250 million,” a former Paramount executive said. He liked smaller movies, too, but his preferences were unabashedly mainstream. “His favorite movie of 2018 was Green Book,” a former Skydance executive said, referring to the milquetoast Oscar winner. “He’s got normie taste.”
The most successful Skydance movies were big four-quadrant franchise films, many of them starring Tom Cruise — the Mission: Impossible series, two Jack Reacher movies. But by the middle of the 2010s, multiple employees at Skydance told me, David wanted to be more creatively involved in the projects he was financing. True Grit was already done when he signed on, and the early Star Trek and Mission: Impossible movies were largely produced by J. J. Abrams and his company Bad Robot, which had become associated with the critically acclaimed blockbusters David aspired to make. The deal Skydance had with Paramount included room for David to pitch original ideas, but the studio had the right to reject them and often did. At one point, Paramount passed on a horror movie set in outer space from Skydance in favor of a horror movie set in outer space from Bad Robot.
Skydance started to pitch movies to other studios all over town, but the projects that David and his team developed on their own were a decidedly mixed bag. Beginning in 2015 with David’s sequel to Terminator, in which Larry offered up an Oracle corporate campus as a set for the headquarters of the villainous Cyberdyne Systems, Skydance released a string of critical and box-office misses: Life, the space-horror movie Paramount had rejected; Geostorm, a schlocky disaster film; and Gemini Man, starring Will Smith as an aging hit man who faces off against a younger version of himself. “I’d never sat in a room during a premiere where you could just feel the cringe wash over everybody who is thinking, How did this happen?” one former Skydance executive said of Gemini Man. Many people I spoke to around Hollywood told me to simply compare the Rotten Tomatoes scores for movies Skydance made with Tom Cruise and movies it made without him. For the last ten movies Skydance has made without Cruise, the average rating from critics is just 39 percent. The average audience rating isn’t much better: 52 percent.
No one doubted David’s desire to make good movies, but the string of bombs left many in Hollywood wondering if he knew how. Skydance had started a television department that found some success, most especially and incongruously with the comedy Grace and Frankie, starring Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, which became at the time the longest-running scripted show in Netflix history. But on the movie side, where David was more involved, there was a certain sameness to every project. One joke went that all it took to get him excited about an idea was to have an airplane in it; another went that every Skydance movie features a moment when someone is falling from the sky. “David knows one type of movie, and it’s the Mission: Impossible type,” a former executive at Skydance said. He and his team, they said, would “give a very consistent note: What are the stakes? What’s the downward pressure? And that’s kind of the extent of it.”
The trouble seemed to stem in part from David’s tendency to look to the past. “David processes movies through the lens of things that came before: ‘You know that scene in Indiana Jones where the thing happens in the temple — make this more like that,’” an executive who has worked on several Skydance films said. He talked often about wanting to model Skydance after Pixar, the company his dad’s friend had started, and in 2019, after forming Skydance’s animation division, he brought in John Lasseter, the 61-year-old former chief creative officer at Pixar who made Toy Story and Cars before being pushed out after allegations of inappropriate workplace behavior. Another former Skydance executive compared David’s habit of working with established stars to a kid collecting baseball cards. “He hired John Lasseter, he was working with Tom Cruise — he was collecting all of his favorite people and things from his childhood,” a former Skydance executive said. “It was like a trophy cabinet.”
Skydance was still working on big franchise films with Paramount, but the relationship grew increasingly sour. Several people told me about a project Skydance had decided to adapt in 2019: The Greatest Beer Run Ever, about a man who goes to Vietnam during the war to cheer up his friends by bringing them beer. Paramount rejected the idea, twice, prompting David to ask for a “come-to-Jesus meeting,” as one Paramount executive put it. David and the Skydance team asked if the Paramount executives thought they had bad taste in movies. “The short answer is ‘yes,’” the Paramount executive told me.
The deal with Paramount ended in 2021, by which point David had already pivoted in part to a new model. Skydance started selling movies to Netflix, Amazon, and Apple, all of which were suddenly hungry for big movies with big stars and willing to pay top dollar for them. Almost all of the action films the company made for streaming services were forgettable star vehicles: 6 Underground with Ryan Reynolds, Fountain of Youth with Natalie Portman and John Krasinski, Ghosted with Ana de Armas and Chris Evans. (The Greatest Beer Run Ever with Zac Efron ended up on Apple.) All of them would have likely been expensive box-office disappointments in theaters, but the streamers not only covered the hefty budgets of each film; they also paid Skydance fees of as high as $25 million per movie no matter how many people ended up watching them.
For all of Skydance’s misses, David has been able to tout the role he played in a singular critical and commercial success. When he made his initial deal with Paramount, he included the rights to be involved in any potential remake of a defining movie from his childhood: Top Gun. David then spent years coaxing Cruise, along with producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Tony Scott, to make a sequel. “Tom never really wanted to do Top Gun and was worried about scarring the legacy, so David went to Tony and Bruckheimer and was working with them to pitch it to Tom,” a former Paramount executive told me. “That was really fucking good producing.” In 2023, Top Gun: Maverick was nominated for Best Picture and became one of the highest-grossing movies of all time.
After a decade of toiling largely behind the scenes, David decided to take some credit. That year, he gave his first-ever live television interview and told reporters that he and Skydance had been “part of developing every single draft of the screenplay.” According to multiple people who worked on the film, David did in fact write an early take on what the story might become, and before its release he successfully filed a protest with the Producers Guild to be given a coveted “p.g.a.” mark next to his name in the credits, to signal his contribution to the production.
Even so, David’s push for recognition struck some in the industry as unbecoming. “If he had asked me, I would have said, ‘David, don’t do it,’” one executive who worked on the film said. It also coincided with a rift between Skydance and Cruise. In a conversation about the budget of the last two Mission: Impossible movies, David suggested that Cruise himself find the money to cover additional costs needed to make the movies, according to multiple people with knowledge of the discussion. As a result, Cruise prohibited Paramount from sharing information with David and Skydance about the movies and wouldn’t attend any meetings if David was in the room. But the success of Top Gun had given David enough confidence to make a big move. In 2023, with Top Gun at the Oscars and Paramount releasing the penultimate Mission: Impossible movie, David met with Shari Redstone for breakfast at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills to talk about buying Paramount.
David’s ambitions in Hollywood have never been financial, at least in a literal sense. The Oracle stock his family owns could make or lose more in a day than David could make or lose on a movie. But people who work with David say it was clear from the beginning that, in addition to making movies, he wanted Skydance to be a serious business. He talked often about building something like Marvel with fantasy and sci-fi universes that could be exploited in a variety of ways as Skydance launched divisions focused on animation, video games, and sports. “David was obsessed with this notion of being a huge company,” a Skydance employee said. “You got the sense it was important to him to prove to the family office that he could do it.”
David’s vision differed from that of the other Ellison in Hollywood. Megan, David’s sister, launched Annapurna Pictures shortly after David launched Skydance. She loved John Cassavetes and Robert Altman and wanted to work with auteurs. Annapurna produced a range of critically acclaimed movies in the 2010s — Zero Dark Thirty, Phantom Thread, Booksmart — and for a moment, she was the closest thing artsy Hollywood had to a Medici, giving filmmakers outsize budgets to make movies that others wouldn’t back. When Paul Thomas Anderson was trying to fund The Master on an $18 million budget, Megan met him for lunch and offered to double it, according to a 2013 profile of Megan in Vanity Fair. Joaquin Phoenix, the movie’s star, called Megan “the Han Solo of filmmaking — you think it’s all over and she comes to save the day.”
The siblings, in other words, fit different Hollywood archetypes. After signing his initial co-financing deal with Paramount, David moved into an office on the studio lot; Megan ran Annapurna in its early days from three houses on the prestigious Bird Streets in the Hollywood Hills. Where David had a reputation for being polite and playing the game, Megan had one for being a challenge to work with. (While considering a potential Steve Jobs biopic with Annapurna, Scott Rudin, who knows a difficult person when he sees one, referred to Megan in an email as a “bipolar 28-year-old lunatic.”) She would sometimes be absent from Annapurna for stretches at a time, much as Larry had often done at Oracle. Matthew Symonds, one of Larry’s multiple biographers, met both of the Ellison children when they were teenagers and found that although Larry had a closer relationship with David, Megan seemed to embody more of his spirit. “I suspect she is naturally wilder and more headstrong than David,” Symonds wrote. “In other words, she is more like her father.” Megan told others at Annapurna a story from 2014, when she became just the fourth person in history to receive two Best Picture nominations at the Academy Awards in the same year, for Her and American Hustle. She called Larry to tell him the news. “Call me back when you win,” he said.
In one respect, Megan and David were trying to solve the same problem: what to do with all they had been given. When they were still young, Larry told a biographer that while his children would never need to make money, they would need to “create something” on their own in order “to feel right, to feel complete.” There are various reports and rumors about exactly how much money Larry has given, or plans to give, each of his two children, but most figures are roughly in line with what Larry once told someone I spoke to: $1.5 billion. Others who knew both siblings were told the money had been distributed in chunks when they turned 25, right around when they launched their companies. Megan told colleagues that she wore a ring on a chain around her neck, like Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, to remind her of the corrupting power her wealth could have.
The most consequential difference between the siblings was how they approached running a business. Many people in Hollywood credit David for hiring seasoned executives and heeding the advice of industry veterans. (One Hollywood executive said that David reminded him of George W. Bush: “His dad got him there, and he was smart enough to surround himself with people who knew what they were doing.”) Megan seemed to take a more impulsive approach. The budgets on Annapurna projects often ballooned and didn’t match the commercial prospects of the movies she was making. Many were disappointments at the box office, and she didn’t have the bankable franchises David had at Paramount to offer dependable returns. Despite the company’s awards and early critical success, Annapurna quickly found itself on shaky ground. In 2017, she made the disastrously costly decision to expand Annapurna into a full-fledged studio that would market and distribute movies in addition to making them. (Megan hoped, briefly, that her brother might distribute Skydance films through her.) A year later, Deadline estimated that Annapurna had spent $200 million releasing five movies that had made a combined $40 million. All told, Annapurna lost hundreds of millions of dollars, according to people with knowledge of the company’s finances.
The siblings also took different approaches to their father and his money. One day early on at Annapurna, an employee at the company said, Megan came into the office and declared it “Annapurna Independence Day,” which employees took to mean that she intended to fund the company on her own. At various points, though, she had to go back to her father to ask for more money. While David treated Larry as an investor, multiple people who worked with Megan said she treated Larry as her dad. One former Annapurna executive compared the distinction to the different ways a young restaurateur might go about raising capital. Megan ran a quirky bistro with an interesting wine list but paid little attention to making sure she cleared enough tables every night, only to ask for money to open a second location in hopes that would solve the problem; David, meanwhile, would have come with detailed P&L and a five-year plan to expand to Miami and Las Vegas. In 2018, Larry sent in staff from his family office to reportedly resolve more than $200 million in debt at Annapurna and help the company avoid bankruptcy.
One lesson, for David and Megan, was that there was in fact a limit to how far their father was willing to fund their Hollywood dreams. In exchange for rescuing Annapurna, Larry had taken ownership of half the company. Megan left Los Angeles for Lanai and, for a period of time, largely disappeared from day-to-day operations at Annapurna, according to people who worked at the company. She had once seemed to be the Ellison most likely to become a big-time Hollywood player, but though she is back at Annapurna, the company has released only a handful of movies in recent years and has largely ceded the auteur space to A24 and Neon. “I feel like such a schmuck,” one movie producer told me. “All those years I was so close to Megan when I should have been kissing David’s ring.”
One afternoon this past fall, I stopped by the Paramount studio lot in Los Angeles to take a tour. The Ellisons had owned the company for only a few weeks, and the facilities staff was still painting the water tower, replacing VIACOM with SKYDANCE. But there were already Skydance mugs in the gift shop and a photo in the welcome center announcing David as the company’s new owner. One of the studio craftsmen my tour group met told us he had seen David just the day before, walking around the lot with a few bodyguards. It was a sunny day, and the craftsman and others at the studio seemed at least cautiously optimistic about the money, youth, and enthusiasm David was bringing to Paramount. The only hint of discord came as our golf cart cruised along Melrose Avenue, where a billboard featuring the leering eyes of yet another serial killer from a Netflix series loomed above a tall row of hedges.
David’s sudden ascent to owning a movie studio took pretty much everyone in Hollywood by surprise. But by the time he approached the Redstones about Paramount in 2023, it was possible to view the attempted takeover as an existential move. Top Gun: Maverick was in the rearview, the Mission: Impossible series was coming to an end, and the streamers that had bankrolled so many mediocre Skydance movies were cutting back to focus on profitability. As Hollywood retrenched after COVID and the writers and actors strikes, consolidation was in the air, and it was possible that Skydance would get squeezed out. The company was too big to survive as a lean independent operation, and besides the Cruise movies, it didn’t control any of the repeatable blockbuster franchises the major studios owned, which had become key to modern Hollywood success.
Among the major studios, Paramount seemed like the easiest to pick off. The company had become weighed down by debt and limped along over the years thanks to the Redstone family’s mismanagement. Paramount+ languished in sixth place among streaming services, and the bulk of the company’s revenue came from CBS and cable television, which have been in decline along with the rest of the linear-television business. Shari Redstone, who had inherited Paramount from her own father, said that by the end of 2023, as David pitched the potential acquisition, she was ready to sell.
The down years at Paramount left even Ellison skeptics hopeful — at a minimum, how could he make things worse? David did promise investors $3 billion in “synergies,” which meant layoffs, and he promptly let go thousands of Paramount employees, more people than the entire workforce he had overseen at Skydance. But he also pledged to start spending. David has said that he plans to nearly double the number of films Paramount releases in theaters and has poached the Duffer brothers, who created Stranger Things, from Netflix; picked up one of Timothée Chalamet’s next projects; and announced that Skydance will adapt the video-game behemoth Call of Duty. His most shocking move, a signal to the town that he had money to throw around, was a seven-year, $7.7 billion agreement for the rights to the Ultimate Fighting Championship — double what Disney had been paying per year to air the fights on ESPN. The move at least fit demographically with what Paramount was known for: NFL football, South Park, the extended Yellowstone universe — at least until Taylor Sheridan, who created Yellowstone, announced that he would be defecting to NBCUniversal.
One part of David’s case for his ability to rejuvenate Paramount stems from his upbringing in the tech world. He has repeatedly said he wants to build the “most technologically capable media company,” and Paramount has positioned him as the only studio executive young enough to know how to code. He plans to consolidate much of Paramount’s technological infrastructure onto services provided by his father’s company and has talked often about a “studio in the cloud” that Oracle had started building for Skydance Animation. The studio in the cloud promised to make moviemaking easier and more efficient and it fit with David’s constant invocations of Steve Jobs and Pixar, which had been the most technologically savvy company in Hollywood when he was growing up. “David would always play up his relationship with Steve Jobs and how he was around when Steve was building Pixar,” a former executive at Skydance said. But people who worked at Skydance Animation said the company’s technological capabilities weren’t especially cutting edge. “We would be sitting in review screenings and say, ‘Huh, this is Pixar from The Incredibles’ or ‘That’s DreamWorks from Shrek,’” a former Skydance executive told me. “The point was we were capable of all this back then, and this seems to be the most Skydance is capable of now.” The movies also weren’t very good. Before David bought Paramount, the studio had ultimately declined to release any of the animated films Skydance was developing; the studio eventually signed a deal with Netflix, but the first film, Spellbound, was such a disappointment that the streamer has expressed a desire to get out of the deal, according to multiple people with knowledge of the discussion. (A representative from Netflix denied that the company was seeking to end the deal early.)
The other part of David’s plan for Paramount, it turns out, was to buy an even bigger company. Back in 2024, shortly after his deal to buy Paramount was announced, David told people that once the acquisition was approved, he intended to go after Warner Bros., which has a coveted film library; the HBO Max streaming service; and valuable franchises like Harry Potter and DC Comics in addition to CNN and a suite of cable channels. Just as Skydance’s best chance at survival was to swallow Paramount, the depressing logic of Hollywood in its consolidation era was that Paramount itself might need to get bigger to keep up with Netflix and Amazon and even YouTube. Otherwise, it would risk being stuck with a second-tier streaming service and declining television assets. Warner Bros. wasn’t explicitly for sale last year, but in September, just a month after finalizing the Paramount deal, news leaked that David was going to try to buy it. Larry, for one, had long argued for the virtues of consolidation, and Oracle earned a reputation for aggressively boxing out its competitors — Larry had orchestrated a hostile takeover of one of them when David was in college. A former Oracle engineer once infamously described the company and its leader as a rapacious machine. “You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawn mower,” he said. “The lawn mower just mows the lawn. You stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off — the end.”
David often speaks in flying metaphors. “One of the things I loved about aerobatic flying as a kid, and that I love about the movie business today, is that when you’re flying an airplane low to the ground, the ground doesn’t care what your last name is,” he has said. “If you hit the ground, it’s going to kill you just the same.” Larry also thought that teaching his son how to fly might engender a sense of responsibility — a useful lesson for a kid who had few of the disadvantages Larry believed had been critical to his success. Steve Jobs told one of Larry’s biographers that he was impressed that his friend was even willing to go up in a plane with teenage David at the controls. “He’s risking his life with his son,” Jobs said. But when Larry heard this comment, he said Jobs was forgetting one thing. “The fact of the matter is that if David does something stupid, I’ll grab the stick,” Larry said.
A major question surrounding David’s takeover of Paramount and potential acquisition of Warner Bros. is how involved Larry wants to be — and what exactly the Ellisons’ intentions are in gobbling up so much of American media. Skydance employees said that Larry rarely came up, and David has always insisted that the company was his alone. At the same time, David said last year that he and his father “talk every day or every other day,” and Ari Emanuel, who owns the UFC, has said Larry was a part of Paramount’s negotiation for the sport’s rights deal. Larry has also been present at every step of David’s pursuit of Warner Bros. After the company rejected Paramount’s initial offer in September, following a one-on-one meeting between David and Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav, David sent his father to talk with Zaslav and John Malone, the chairman emeritus of Warner Bros., whom Larry has known since the 1990s. David also brought his father to a dinner with Zaslav before Thanksgiving and invoked Larry in a final desperate text message to Zaslav — David misspelled Zaslav’s name as “Daivd” — in early December when it became clear that Warner Bros. intended to accept the offer from Netflix instead. “If we have the privilege to work together, you will see that my father and I are the people you had dinner with,” David wrote.
Most of the suspicion swirling around the Ellisons involves their apparent closeness with, and deference to, the Trump administration. During the Paramount merger process, Skydance lawyers pushed the company to settle Donald Trump’s flimsy lawsuit alleging misleading edits of a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris and suggested making a donation to the Kennedy Center, which Trump was in the process of taking over. Paramount eventually agreed to donate $16 million to Trump’s presidential library. The New York Times recently reported that Trump says Larry promised him the Ellisons would make CBS News a more conservative outlet, and David was spotted ringside with Trump at a UFC match before the lawsuit was settled. Trump immediately crowed publicly that he also had a handshake deal with Skydance for $20 million in free TV advertising. David has had plenty of opportunities to refute the claim but has declined to explicitly do so. Since the Ellisons began pursuing Warner Bros., Larry has reportedly spoken with White House officials about bringing sweeping changes to CNN, including removing specific anchors. He even brought back actionable intelligence: Trump wanted to see a fourth movie in the Rush Hour series starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker. The series’ director, Brett Ratner, was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women in 2017, and his only other recent project has been a forthcoming documentary on Melania Trump for Amazon. Many studios, including Paramount under its previous leadership, had reportedly passed on Rush Hour 4. Under the Ellisons, Paramount has agreed to distribute it.
David with President Trump at a UFC fight.
Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP PHOTO/Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
The kowtowing to Trump has fueled concerns about the Ellisons’ plans for CBS News, especially following the hiring of Bari Weiss as the network’s editor-in-chief. According to many people who know him, David has shown little interest over the years in being actively involved in the news business, and after a symbolic visit to the CBS newsroom on his first day of owning Paramount, he has spent no time there. “I don’t think of David as a person with a mastermind view of how the world should work, who wants to influence the media at scale,” a former Skydance employee who worked closely with David said. But David did put in place an unusual corporate reporting structure in which Weiss reports directly to him, rather than through the head of CBS — an arrangement that has imbued every decision Weiss has made with speculation about whether David might be influencing her choices. In December, around the same time that David was in Washington trying to make the case that Netflix’s potential ownership of Warner Bros. presented more of an antitrust issue given the size of a combined Netflix and HBO Max streaming service, Weiss abruptly pulled a 60 Minutes segment on allegations of abuse at a prison in El Salvador where the American government has deported migrants. Weiss argued the story was incomplete largely because it lacked an on-the-record comment from the administration, but the last-minute decision, given the Ellisons’ growing willingness to cater to Trump, left open the possibility that she had gotten word from her boss to pull some punches.
Neither Larry nor David has ever been especially ideological, and people who know the Ellisons say it’s best to think of their political maneuvering as largely self-interested. Larry grew up a Democrat and boasted about being the second-biggest donor to Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, although he seemed to mostly like hanging out with him. “The man heightens your senses and teaches you what it means to be alive,” Larry once said after a night out with Clinton in New Orleans. In office, Clinton largely disappointed Larry on everything but NAFTA. When Trump emerged, Larry reportedly spent around $50 million backing Republican alternatives — Marco Rubio in 2016, Tim Scott in 2024 — but he also hosted a fundraiser for Trump in 2020, when he was the only option, and joined a phone call with Lindsey Graham and Sean Hannity about challenging the election result. Last year, Larry appeared twice at the White House: to discuss, first, government investments in the infrastructure fueling the AI boom, which would benefit Oracle, and, later, the ownership of the American version of TikTok, which includes Oracle.
David rarely talked about politics at Skydance, but a person who had lunch with him days before the 2016 election said it was clear he was concerned about Trump’s rise. He has since told others that he didn’t vote in 2016. In 2020, Skydance Animation hired a director of creative inclusion to make sure the stories it was telling were sufficiently diverse. In 2022, David said he was “socially liberal” and clarified that “everybody in my family believes [2020] was a free and fair election and accepts the results.” In 2024, his political donations went exclusively to Democrats, including nearly a million dollars to the Biden-Harris campaign. His pivot to hanging out at UFC fights with Trump, and to agreeing to follow a Trump-administration push to do away with diversity initiatives, seems almost entirely a means to a business end. David has so far shown a willingness to stand up to the administration only when it seems to be in his interest to do so: The creators of South Park, one of Paramount’s most popular shows, have said they have experienced no corporate interference this season, which has included a running plotline in which Trump has a baby with Satan.
The one issue about which the Ellisons do have deeply held beliefs is Israel. Larry’s first wife described him as “an ardent Zionist” and remembered him taking a week off work to watch coverage of the Six-Day War in 1967. (He had a cat at the time named Yitzhak, after the Israeli general and future prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.) Larry is close with Benjamin Netanyahu, who reportedly vacationed on Larry’s Hawaiian island in 2021. David once joined Larry on a trip to Israel and posted a photo to Instagram from a dinner with the prime minister. “I am very grateful for everything he has done and continues to do for the nation of Israel! #bibinetanyahu,” David wrote. After October 7, David declared that “Skydance stands with Israel,” and the Ellisons’ support for the country goes part of the way to explaining the hiring of Weiss. This past fall, at a memorial for Skip Brittenham, the Hollywood deal-maker who helped David start his career, David found himself talking to Lawrence Bender, a producer who was struggling to find a home for a limited series about October 7 told from the perspective of six victims. A few days later, David announced that Paramount would stream the show on the anniversary of October 7. “David Ellison is like a god,” Bender said at the time. “In this atmosphere, it’s very brave, to say the least.”
David is clearly uncomfortable with the persistent questions about his father’s involvement and the speculation that the Ellisons have more political aims than simply running a profitable media business. In October, when he was asked about this onstage at a Bloomberg conference in Los Angeles — “What do you say to people who are concerned there’s, like, an Ellison–slash–Ellison-Trump plot to just, like, corner the media business?” — David stammered through an answer. “I know where you’re going … Look, it’s, umm … under the headline of doing better, I can uhh … I can only speak to … Look …” David said, before finding his footing. “Does the last 20 years of my life not equate?” His life was suddenly stressful in ways it had never been; he used to insist on traveling without security but now has bodyguards with him wherever he goes. “David is entering a period where he’s going to transform,” a former Skydance employee who worked closely with David told me. “And in a way he might not fully like.”
Then again, others who know David say ambition is simply in his DNA. In Mike Wilson’s 1997 biography of Larry, The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: God Doesn’t Think He’s Larry Ellison, Wilson notes a number of similarities between his subject and the main character from Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’s film about a fictional media mogul who loses himself in pursuit of an empire. This was years before Larry had expressed interest in the media business, though others have noted his likeness to a character whose unquenchable thirst for power ultimately stems from a disrupted childhood. When a reporter asked Steve Jobs what had motivated his friend Larry over the years, Jobs thought for a second, then whispered, “Rosebud.”
Unfortunately for Larry and David, Citizen Kane is in the Warner Bros. library, and they aren’t the only ones with Kane-like ambitions. Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO of Netflix, keeps a replica of the Rosebud sled in his home. Netflix took both Hollywood and the Ellisons by surprise in December when it emerged victorious over Paramount and Comcast in the auction for Warner Bros. The company had never made an acquisition of this size and had publicly downplayed the idea of buying Warner Bros. as recently as October. But in addition to underestimating Netflix, the Ellisons may have made a pair of miscalculations, both involving Larry. The first was to misjudge the solidity of his relationship with Trump, which seemed to form part of the Ellisons’ case to Warner Bros. that Paramount would have a smoother regulatory path to a potential merger than Netflix. But after Trump declared both of the Ellisons “friends of mine” in October, he changed his tune in December after a critical CBS report. “If they are friends, I’d hate to see my enemies,” Trump wrote. He even declared Sarandos to be a “fantastic man.”
The other misstep involved Larry’s money. The presumption was always that he would simply pay whatever price to buy Warner Bros. for his son, but Larry ultimately agreed to fund only roughly $12 billion of Paramount’s $108 billion bid. Instead, Paramount secured additional equity from three sovereign-wealth funds, which brought concerns about what influence those countries might have on a company that would own CBS and CNN. (Larry has since agreed to personally guarantee all of the roughly $40 billion in equity that is part of the offer, in case any of the Middle Eastern funds drops out of the deal.) The shareholder vote to approve the deal is still months away, and the Ellisons have continued to argue that their offer is a superior all-cash bid to Netflix’s mix of both cash and stock, hoping that enough Warner Bros. shareholders will prefer their deal instead.
David, in the meantime, is contending with the fact that the mood toward him has dimmed, even among people who are hopeful about his chances of reviving Paramount. He spent two decades successfully battling the narrative that he was just a mediocre executive with money and a powerful father, but the bungling of the Warner Bros. pursuit — leaning on Larry, cozying up to Trump, presuming victory — has produced doubts about whether he is someone who can lead the industry into a better future. Is David Ellison a serious person? Last month, when the effort to buy Warner Bros. was falling apart, he backed out of an appearance at a business conference in New York but offered to make amends by coming back next time and bringing his father with him.
The consensus in the business is that if David wants to best Netflix, Larry will need to pony up and increase the Ellisons’ offer. He might. “I’m addicted to winning,” Larry once said in an appearance on 60 Minutes, a show his family now owns. But it isn’t clear how high they will go, and one limiting factor may be the stock market. Since the Ellisons made their first bid in September, Larry’s net worth has fallen by more than $100 billion as concerns about the AI bubble eliminated much of Oracle’s gains this year.
Larry has plenty of other ways to spend his time and money. He recently spent $30 million on a safari park in Florida and $24 million to buy two units in the Pierre that had been owned by the Redstone family. He has owned a series of increasingly large superyachts, including a 191-foot boat he named the Izanami, after a Shinto deity, until it was pointed out that the name spelled “I’m a Nazi” backward; after upgrading to a 452-foot yacht, Larry has since downsized to one that is 288 feet long. He has pledged more than $1 billion toward building the Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford, England, as an incubator of for-profit companies that would tackle various world problems, and has devoted hundreds of millions of dollars over the years to anti-aging research. He is 81 but has said in the past that he wants to live to 150 and doesn’t intend to just leave his money for his kids to spend without him.
He will also have more dreams to fund. For years, Megan and David were Larry’s only children, although he has mused about having more. Recently, he did. He and his current wife, Jolin Zhu, who is in her 30s, have been quietly raising four young children. “He’s a much better father this time around, and he freely admits that,” a friend of Larry’s told me. In recent years, they were reportedly seen shopping for a country estate near Oxford, where they hope to enroll a family member at Eton, the world’s preeminent boarding school for boys.
Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism.
If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 12, 2026, issue of
New York Magazine.
Want more stories like this one? Subscribe now
to support our journalism and get unlimited access to our coverage.
If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 12, 2026, issue of
New York Magazine.
One Great Story: A Nightly Newsletter for the Best of New York
The one story you shouldn’t miss today, selected by New York’s editors.
Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice