The Ellisons Want Your Data

Written By Leeja Miller

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Transcript:

Listen there has been some romantic drama brewing between the throuple Warner Brothers Discovery, Netflix, and Paramount Skydance and yes that’s only three companies with all the mergers every company sounds like 5 companies these days. It’s a tale of will they or won’t they that has the entertainment industry up in arms but also involves shady billionaire villains, covert government operations, and a bid to drain all of us of whatever data, time, attention, and money we have to give. Today we’re discussing the implications of a merger between Warner Brothers and one of its suitors, the Ellisons, the creepy billionaire family attempting to build a media and data empire, and why all of this is, as per usual, really bad for everyone except the rich and powerful. Love that for us!!

First, the details: Warner Brothers Discovery is already itself the product of massive mergers in the entertainment industry over the last few decades. First it was AOL in the early 2000s, a merger that fell apart after the dot com bubble burst. Then there was Warner Media and AT&T, a merger that fell apart because it never made sense to begin with and then COVID signalled its death knell. And then in 2022, Warner Brothers and AT&T pivoted, with Warner Bros merging with just AT&T’s entertainment assets, including Discovery, CNN, TNT, HGTV, etc., to create a “global leader in entertainment.” This was, again, a merger that didn’t actually make any sense. Warner Brothers’ key asset includes HBO. You know, the premiere place for TV programming that created shows like Sex and the City and the Sopranos, these incredibly popular, boundary pushing programs. HBO has been known for it’s incredibly high quality programming. So tell me why I can now watch my guilty pleasure show, 90 Day Fiance, alongside the Sopranos and Game of Thrones? The merger didn’t make sense for consumers but that’s about the last thing any of these guys actually care about. And David Zaslav, initially the head of Discovery, is now the CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery, and has proven himself incredibly inept at managing the company. He is the reason why HBO has gone from HBO Max to just Max to just HBO or whatever the fuck it is now, because the merger doesn’t make sense and he’s trying to push together a bunch of media solely for the sake of getting more of our eyeballs and time and attention and ad dollars and he can’t manage to land on a single brand identity for all of it. But that is the least of his concerns right now.

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There are six companies that own the vast majority of the media we consume in the United States, but of course that level of conglomeration simply isn’t enough! So here we are. On Friday, Warner Brothers Discovery announced it had reached a deal with Netflix for $72 billion dollars, for just its Warner Brothers movie studio and its streaming assets. Netflix’s goal here is of course to expand its studio business and increase the amount of offerings it has. I heard reports that Netflix said Netflix wants to become HBO before HBO becomes Netflix. Sure, whatever. This announcement Friday came after months of the newly merged Paramount Skydance, headed up by David Ellison, attempting to woo Warner Brothers Discovery into agreeing to Paramount acquiring the entire company. This included lavish dinners and, towards the end, frantic texts and phone calls when Warner Brothers started not returning Paramount’s texts as it cozied up to Netflix. And so on Monday, Paramount announced a hostile takeover bid of Warner Brothers. Basically, you wouldn’t play nice, so we’re doing it anyway. In a hostile takeover bid, typically a company will make an offer to buy another company’s shares from its shareholders, usually explicitly against the wishes of the company’s management. So Netflix’s bid is something like $27 per share, as agreed upon with Warner Brother’s management, whereas Paramount is offering $30 per share, going around management and saying directly to the shareholders hey we can offer you a better deal and Warner Brothers is withholding this deal from you. Once Paramount buys all those shares and acquires a majority stake in Warner Brothers, it can then use that majority stake to install a new board of directors that would then approve the official merger. Shareholders have to vote to approve a takeover bid in this scenario. But even if they do, the government has to then approve the merger.

There are two, well, three government bodies that are concerned with this potential merger. One is the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, which is concerned with fostering competition and the public interest within communications like TV. In the case of a merger with Netflix, that is less of a concern as Netflix as a streaming service is less like Paramount which owns CBS and other broadcasting companies. In a potential Paramount merger with Warner Brothers, that would put channels like CBS under the same ownership as CNN, which creates deep concerns about monopolization and the public interest that the FCC would need to review.

Then there’s the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, which more broadly is concerned with antitrust issues across sectors including in tech and entertainment. Here, Netflix argues the FTC shouldn’t be worried, because Netflix thinks that it isn’t just competing with other streaming services, it’s actually competing with all other media–with YouTube, with TikTok, and with all other activities that humans could be doing besides watching Netflix. Yes Netflix has named SLEEP as one of its competitors. So when you broaden the market like that, it makes Netflix look like a tiny share of the overall media and attention market, so what’s the harm in one little merger, despite the fact that it has the largest market share in streaming and coming together with HBO would grow that market share to a level that will likely hurt consumers. And Paramount of course argues that IT is the better bet when it comes to overcoming regulatory hurdles because of its diversified portfolio, it’s not just streaming, it does so many other things, so its market share is also diversified and therefore there’s nothing to worry about!

The third government entity that might be concerned here is the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an interagency body concerned with national security risks posed by foreign investment in US businesses. And WHY would they be concerned with this potential merger? Because the Paramount deal allegedly includes backing from the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi, as well as Jared Kushner, the son in law of the President, through his company Affinity Partners, all of which are providing the financial backing necessary for the multi billion dollar offer from Paramount. They claim there’s no issue here because all of those entities have allegedly agreed to forgo any governance rights, according to Paramount. I JUST made an episode about the unsettling arrangements happening between Saudi oil wealth and US-based tech billionaires, as put on clear display at the lavish White House dinner Trump threw for Saudi crown prince Muhammad bin Salman about a month ago. We want their oil and oil money, they want foreign investment and access to advanced weapons to further their own interests in the middle east.

And it’s important to note how central the government is in these deals because at the head of all of this is, of course, Donald Trump. This is yet another reason why concentrating the power of the administrative state into the hands of the President by giving him complete control over hiring and firing and putting in place sycophants and yes men in charge of agencies meant to protect US, the PEOPLE, is incredibly dangerous. See my video from Monday for a background on how the Supreme Court is about to expand Trump’s power to do just this. Because we have a megalomaniac who will do anything if you stroke his ego at the helm of major bodies meant to regulate the very billionaires who are in his ear and stroking his ego. This was made obvious when on Monday, when asked about the potential merger, Trump said we’ll see, quote “none of them are particularly great friends of mine.” And whether or not the heads of major companies are friends with the president SHOULD NOT MATTER when it comes to governmental regulations but here we are and we’re not even trying to hide it anymore.

But also that’s a bold face fucking lie because Trump is particularly good friends with one of the people involved in this takeover bid: Larry fuckin Ellison. And let’s talk about this creep because I’m so fucking sick of billionaires ruining my goddamn life and this guy is fucking foaming at the mouth to make EVERYTHING worse for all of us.

Larry Ellison was born in New York City in NINETEEN FORTY FOUR to a mother who gave him to her aunt and uncle to adopt him when he was 9 months old. And he has taken that deep wound of childhood abandonment and made it all of OUR fucking problems by becoming a literal Disney villain. Larry did the classic move of dropping out of college and getting into computers early enough that he was able to make a fortune off of it. His company Oracle is one of those companies that no one really understands what they do, but they handle the back end of the internet, they house the data, they manage the cloud. And so with this latest AI boom, which requires MASSIVE like unprecedented earth ending amounts of data, well there’s Larry to cash in. He briefly surpassed Elon Musk as the richest person in the world this year and currently sits at second, and that bump is all due to the AI bubble. And he’s trying to take advantage of this blip in his fortune by building himself an empire not based on the speculative AI market but instead on the very real thing he based his original fortune on: data. Our data. Data he can derive from us through the time and energy we give to consuming never ending amounts of content and the advertisements that get placed on that content.

But before we get into that I want to drive home how fucking evil this man is, like all billionaires are evil because you inherently must exploit workers and natural resources to accumulate that much wealth, but let’s talk about how this specific billionaire, Larry Ellison, is evil. He owns 98% of the island of Lanai in Hawaii. An island where 3000 people live. As part of that ownership, he owns the lands and the people who live there pay him rent. They also work at the resorts and other tourist attractions that he owns. It’s a company town. On an island. The people there pay him rent, he pays them for their work, and if they get fired he also evicts them. He also is one of those old creepy rich white men who’s obsessed with Japanese aesthetic. Like REALLY obsessed. Like owns a 23 acre estate in Woodside California that he has spent 200 million dollars renovating into a kyoto-inspired compound, with a private lake, a tea house, a koi pond, but oh he also actually owns a literal villa in Kyoto located on the grounds of a Zen Buddhist temple. And he has the asian wife to go with it of course, though his fifth wife, 34 year old Jolin Zhu, is Chinese. He’s 81. Woof. Ellison has more than a dozen homes, including one in Florida which, at $172 million dollars, was the most expensive real estate transaction in Florida history at the time of its purchase.

He also loves flying, so much that he owns two MILITARY jets, on top of, you know, numerous other private jets. Oh and his super-yacht is called Musashi, after the samurai warrior Miyamoto Musashi, obviously, it’s 288 feet long, designed in what’s that oh yes Japanese style, cost $160 million dollars, takes a crew of 23 people to operate, and is a DOWNGRADE from his previous yacht. This was his more modest choice because his LAST yacht was over 400 FEET LONG, so huge it could literally only park itself alongside like major oil tankers, so he couldn’t hang out parked next to his other rich friends because his YACHT WAS TOO BIG and on top of that no one ever wanted to hang out with him on it because they said it felt like hanging out in a creepy abandoned mall. That’s how big it was. It was so big it creeped out other rich people.

And just to put into perspective how fucking wasteful this all is, according to Yatco dot com, superyachts, which are 100 feet long and above, reminder Ellison’s downgraded yacht is 288 feet long, superyachts can burn upwards of FIVE HUNDRED GALLONS of diesel fuel PER HOUR. 500 gallons. Of DIESEL. Per HOUR. Some vessels hold more than 50,000 GALLONS of gas, meaning it can cost more than $200,000 just to fill the tank on one of these things. 500 GALLONS PER HOUR. For comparison my honda hybrid gets 40 miles to the gallon. When I take her out to really stretch her legs, at top speeds that means I’m burning 2 gallons of regular unleaded per hour. 500 GALLONS PER HOUR OF DIESEL. This is what I mean when I say I don’t actually give a shit about people who have a few million dollars. The people who are ruining our fucking LIVES through their unconscionable levels of exploitation, pollution, and greed, are the ones like Larry Ellison who can afford not only to buy but also to upkeep superyachts that burn 500 GALLONS OF DIESEL FUEL PER HOUR, or own at least 12 homes all of which are probably larger than your average apartment complex that can house 100 people. It’s fucking despicable, it’s truly pure evil. And studies show that someone like Larry Ellison, conspicuously degrading our planet on a daily basis, cause more damage than just their own C02 footprint. Because when the rest of us see something like that, it makes us all feel like what’s the fucking point. Like thank god I compost my coffee grounds in a bucket in the backyard, ya know? What’s the fucking point. If we’re ALL not working together to save the planet, if we see these people creating a C02 footprint in one year larger than the one we’ll make in our entire lifetimes, it doesn’t really help the cause, ya know. Larry Ellison’s existence is so damaging to the entire planet, and it’s about to get so much worse if this merger with Warner Brothers goes through.

And that’s a big if, because of the regulatory hurdles, but he has been buttering up Trump for YEARS and is surely attempting to cash in on that good will through this. Ellison donated to both Democrats and Republicans for years up until around 2016. Then he donated to various of Trump’s Republican opponents until about 6 months after the 2020 election, when Larry was on a call along with other Trump supporters and operatives to discuss a strategy for undermining the 2020 election. That’s right Ellison was all in on the stop the steal conspiracy. And ever since then he has been doing everything he can to stay in Trump’s good graces, including giving tens of millions of dollars to various Trump-supporting PACs. Oh also Ellison is a MAJOR supporter of Israel, having donated millions and millions of dollars to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. He says he’s less in it because of his Jewish heritage, which he’s never strongly identified with on a religious level at least, but more so because of the innovations and tech coming out of Israel. Which somehow makes it even more evil how much he fucking loves Israel. Like oh no this isn’t PERSONAL for me, this is truly just about the various like weapons and other innovations they’re coming up with out there to commit genocide, I’m just really passionate about that.

So if all this palm greasing pays off for Ellison, who is financially backing the merger between Warner Brothers and Paramount Skydance which is owned by his son David, that will mean that he will have a major stake and control over CBS through Paramount and CNN through Warner Brothers. Through David Ellison’s leadership–no doubt influenced greatly by Papa Ellison who has financially backed everything baby David has done–CBS has made a rightward turn, including hiring an ombudsman to “check” the bias of CBS’s work as well as buying The Free Press, a glorified substack headed by Bari Weiss who is now the Editor in Chief of CBS despite not having the experience necessary for the role. She’s the kind of opinion writer who dresses her right wing opinions up as “centrist” and sells them as “unbiased.” And she’ll bring that style of covert right-wing bias pushing bullshit to CBS. And Paramount purchased The Free Press for $150 MILLION dollars, a truly astonishing amount of money to pay for again a SUBSTACK with about 170,000 paying subscribers. Overpaying by that amount was clearly a bid by Paramount to keep Trump happy, which of course is futile because you’re dealing with someone with the temperament of a toddler. He’s already mad at CBS again for a 60 minutes interview they did with Marjorie Taylor Greene with whomst he’s currently in a lovers spat. But they’re doing everything they can to stay on his good side. And since even before the finalization of Paramount’s merger with Skydance, Larry and David have been conspiring over acquiring Warner Brothers, including CNN. In fact, last month reports surfaced that Larry Ellison had sat down with a White House official to discuss which news anchors they would ax at CNN once they managed to gain control over the network. So like Larry has been incredibly confident for months that this merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers would happen, which explains why, when it was announced Friday that Warner Brothers had agreed to a deal with Netflix, Paramount decided to take the nuclear option with a hostile takeover bid. Because I’m sure that Larry Ellison knows that Trump will step in or pull whatever strings he needs to to get his friend Larry the deal he wants so bad. Especially because that means that Trump will have an ally in charge of two of the largest news networks in the country, on top of Fox, and we know Trump cares very deeply about what the news says about him, so the more influence he can exert in that realm, the happier he’ll be.

But wait, it gets worse!! Because on top of having major influence over CBS and potentially CNN, plus you know all the negative ramifications that come from media conglomeration when it comes to creatives and the ability to find work and produce great art, something I’m not trying to gloss over because it is really important but this video would be 2 hours long if I got into everything, in addition to ALL of that, Larry Ellison is about to gain major control over a social media app used daily by over half of the entire American public: tiktok. Ellison’s company Oracle is one of the companies that has been named by the White House as in talks to finalize a deal to buy TikTok for $14 billion. The deal itself is suspicious as hell, not only because we don’t really know the state of the deal like there have been zero updates, last month The Verge reported that even lawmakers in charge of writing and pushing for the law that forced the sale of TikTok out of the hands of majority Chinese ownership even THEY are in the dark about what’s going on with the deal. But also because the US stake in TikTok alone has been valued at $50 billion dollars but the government is approving a sale of $14 billion, a sweetheart deal to help some of Trump’s good friends like Larry Ellison pay rock bottom prices for an incredibly valuable app. Like I said, the state of that deal is unclear. It’s unclear if Americans would have to download an entirely separate app. It’s unclear when the switchover would happen. It’s unclear what algorithm the app would use. Some have said that the US version of the app would license an algorithm from Bytedance, the Chinese parent company, but that could violate the law pushing for Tiktok’s sale because a license agreement would be ongoing, allowing for continued Chinese influence over the app. So it could mean US-based users of TikTok would be cut off from the rest of the world on their own little app where nothing gets in or out, which has pretty devastating consequences considering how much that app has been a lifeline and a means of getting news for millions of Americans during and after the pandemic. Especially for young Americans, some of whom use TikTok for numerous hours every single day, the ramifications in their access to information, and what information they do get fed, could be huge. We’re talking potential censorship of left-leaning content, of content critical of israel, of content created by organizers, of content that doesn’t fit the narrative of the Trump regime, we have no way of knowing but it would be very hard to trust anything coming from a TikTok controlled in part by Larry Ellison, a strong ally of both Israel and of President Trump. I think best case scenario is that the new algorithm under the new leadership is bad, causing the American people to emerge from their TikTok trance long enough to decide to dump the app because it’s not as fun anymore. That’s the best case scenario.

But even so, taking a step back helps us understand the underlying motivations behind this hostile takeover bid and the Ellison’s attempt to expand their empire. The Ellisons made their fortune by trading in data. Our data. They have been compared to the Vanderbilts or the Rockefellers, but instead of mining coal or iron or building railroads, they are trading in data and building a monopoly in data in the process. And by expanding to TikTok and to streaming and to TV and movies and entertainment, they are attempting to mine OUR data, to take our time and our literal lives by monopolizing our attention to enrich themselves. Because while the creators of entertainment media may consider themselves artists and look at their work as art, and perhaps the studio moguls and even David and Larry Ellison themselves may appreciate media as an art form, may have a love for movies or appreciate the importance of art, I mean Larry Ellison owns multiple Van Goghs, though of course fine art is also a form of investment to hold on to wealth, but sure I’m willing to grant that even Larry Ellison himself is able to appreciate the art of cinema. Even still, at the end of the day when it comes to business, all content is simply a means to hold our attention long enough to sell us shit. I mean Netflix literally wants us to sleep less in order to watch more Netflix, like they don’t care about our entertainment, our wellbeing, they care about keeping our eyes glued to THEIR streaming app long enough to show us enough ads so they can make more ad revenue and deliver shareholder value. Like it is really upsetting that Idiocracy is one of the most prescient movies in history. That’s really stupid. This is the dumbest timeline. But what’s more insidious is that not only are they trying to drain us of our time, and our time is all we have, what we do with our days is what makes up our lives and increasingly we are giving our LIFE to TikTok and Netflix, but they are also in cahoots with the government and inspired by ulterior motives in how they promote the content they want us to watch in between the advertisements. So they have an electorate, glued to screens that they have direct control over. And so the rich can collude with the government to get them all richer, the government can look the other way when big businesses conglomerate and violate our antitrust laws, laws that are ALREADY ON THE BOOKS by the way like there isn’t this need for Congress to act to pass laws, THE LAWS ALREADY EXIST they just haven’t been enforced since before the Reagan era, and they will continue to not be enforced so long as big business and the government continue to collude to fuck us all over.

And it’s not just the Republicans. The Democratic leadership in the House, led by Hakeem Jeffries, just announced the creation of a “House Democratic Commission on AI and the Innovation Economy” to quote “develop policy expertise in partnership with the innovation community, relevant stakeholders, and committees of jurisdiction.” The Democratic representatives that Jeffries picked to be on this AI board? According to Sludge quote “The panel’s leaders rank among the House Democrats with the deepest ties to Big Tech and AI, from holding millions of dollars in tech stock to the contributions they’ve raised for their campaigns and the Republican-backed deregulation bills they’ve signed onto.” Both parties are in the pockets of big business, especially big tech and AI, and there is NO ONE at the table who is advocating for any of us. Period. The 99% are completely absent from being considered in any of this for anything other than our attention, our data, and our dollars, which we are freely giving in the form of hours spent scrolling TikTok and numerous monthly subscriptions we have to the neverending mubis and tubis and boobies and peacock and paramount and netflix and croobpop and zimbo or whatever the fuck other new streaming app is out there vying for our attention and data. I’m sick of it!!!! I am so sick of constantly being advertised to and enduring shittier and shittier products and services and content as everything conglomerates and gets worse and worse. And so I’m opting the fuck out. I’m slowly whittling down my subscriptions. I’m experimenting with checking DVDs and other media out from my local library. I deleted TikTok and Instagram from my phone and I turned my iPhone to grayscale so it’s as boring as possible and I look at it less. I try to stream things on PBS or through Kanopy, which is the streaming service that links to your local library so you can access it for free with your library card. I’ve just stopped consuming so much. Which I recognize is fucking rich coming from a literal content creator hi hello I literally make my living off the ads you have to watch in order to access my content. Though I will note the ads or sponsors never dictate what is in the content I create, for the record. But I’m also not saying you should sit quietly in a room handspinning your own clothes. Like there truly IS no ethical consumption under capitalism and we deserve to do what we want and live rich exciting lives but I’m just trying to create friction between myself and the numerous content generation machines that are vying for my attention and ultimately my data and my money. I’m trying to be more mindful about the content I do consume and where my money is going and to whom. And it’s truly not easy. The path of least resistance in this current environment is to download the apps and pay the subscriptions and keep consuming. But I reject that that is the only or best way to live a life. I reject that that is the best way to “unwind” after a busy day. I am unwilling to spend my time thoughtlessly and to the benefit of creepy ass billionaires with yachts that guzzle 500 GALLONS OF DIESEL FUEL PER HOUR!!!! And I would challenge you to think critically about how you’re spending your time as well. And believe me I’m not coming from a high horse here I have also spent hours and hours and hours on TikTok, I LOVE TikTok, genuinely. Like Instagram, Twitter, facebook, all trash, but I LOVE TikTok. I LOVE the convenience of being able to watch exactly what I want to when I want to. It is definitively HARDER to have to RENT A DVD FROM THE LIBRARY like who the fuck has the time for it. I have one sitting on hold waiting for me right now and the thought of having to go pick it up is nearly too much to bear. But in the indelible words of the early 2000s smash hit song All At Once by American rock band The Fray, “sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same.”

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And if you liked this episode, you’ll like the one from Monday about how the Supreme Court is about to give even MORE power to Trump. I love it here!!

Leeja Miller
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