All the reach in the world
On Monday, December 8, Paramount launched a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery—a US$108 billion offer that went straight to shareholders, bypassing the board that had just approved an $83 billion deal with Netflix. If successful, the Ellison family would add CNN, HBO, and the Warner Bros. studio to a media portfolio that already includes CBS, MTV, Comedy Central, and a major stake in TikTok’s American operations.
It’s a remarkable shopping spree. David Ellison’s Paramount spent some US$150 million just on The Free Press, the digital publication founded by Bari Weiss. His father, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, is part of the consortium that acquired TikTok’s U.S. business from Beijing-based ByteDance in a deal blessed by the White House—a deal Project Liberty and other opponents are fighting in court. The world’s second-richest person now stands to control platforms reaching hundreds of millions of Americans.
But the Ellisons aren’t operating in a vacuum. Elon Musk owns X. Mark Zuckerberg controls Facebook and Instagram. Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. A few ultra-wealthy American businessmen have consolidated their hold over a vast range of media properties. Meanwhile, the emergence of Substack, podcasts, and countless online outlets has fragmented the sources Americans actually get their news from.
So how much does it actually matter that a few billionaires own so many media companies?
Michael Socolow is a professor of communication and journalism at the University of Maine. Socolow sees something counterintuitive in the Ellison family’s acquisitions: not a sign that billionaires are consolidating control over American media, but that they’re consolidating control over the most valuable media companies—properties whose audiences have shrunk dramatically but whose relative worth has soared. But reaching Americans isn’t the same as persuading them. And while we may overestimate the media’s power over politics, we may be underestimating politics’ power over the media …
Gustav Jönsson: How consolidated is American news media in the hands of billionaires?
