One family stands weeks away from controlling CBS, CNN, HBO, and a piece of TikTok — more of the American media landscape than any single entity has held in modern history. The Ellison family’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery is the largest in a series of moves by conservative billionaires to buy, reshape, and editorially redirect the country’s news infrastructure.
Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison pledged $40.4 billion of his own money to finance his son David’s hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance already owns CBS, Paramount Studios, and Paramount+ after completing its purchase in August 2025. Oracle holds a 15 percent stake in U.S. TikTok’s operations. The company controls the platform’s content moderation rules for 170 million American users.
David Ellison attended President Trump’s State of the Union address as the guest of Sen. Lindsey Graham two days before the Warner Bros. Discovery board accepted Paramount’s bid over Netflix’s. The Guardian reported that Larry Ellison spoke directly with Trump about which CNN anchors the president wanted removed. Trump named Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar.
What happens after acquisition is already visible at CBS. David Ellison installed Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief after purchasing her digital outlet, The Free Press, for $150 million. In December, Weiss pulled a completed 60 Minutes segment on Trump’s deportation of Venezuelans to El Salvador’s CECOT prison two hours before air. The piece had already been screened multiple times and cleared by CBS attorneys, and correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi called the decision political, not editorial.
The Ellisons are not operating alone. Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022. He paid $44 billion, disbanded its content moderation team, and reinstated accounts banned for violating platform rules — including Trump’s. His AI company xAI absorbed the platform in March 2025, and SpaceX acquired xAI in February 2026 — consolidating Musk’s media and AI holdings under one roof. Musk served as Trump’s senior advisor and led the Department of Government Efficiency before departing the administration.
Jeff Bezos followed a parallel track at the Washington Post. He killed the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris in October 2024, and more than 300,000 subscribers canceled. Four months later, he directed the opinion section to publish only in support of “personal liberties and free markets,” barred opposing viewpoints, and prompted the resignation of opinion editor David Shipley. Bezos dined with Trump the same week he announced the changes, while Amazon — which Bezos founded — faces an active antitrust lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission.
Foreign money underpins the largest of these deals. Sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar are investing $24 billion in the Paramount–Warner Bros. merger, and Gulf capital also financed the TikTok deal and backed Musk’s original Twitter purchase. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, after walking away from his own bid for Warner Bros., called the sovereign fund involvement a “bad idea” from a region not known for press freedom. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was implicated by U.S. intelligence in the 2018 killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
The consolidation extends to local television. Sinclair Broadcast Group operates 193 stations across the country and requires its affiliates to air centrally produced conservative commentary segments. Its signal reaches 40 percent of American households. In November 2025, Sinclair began building a stake in E.W. Scripps, which owns 60 additional stations, and the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals loosened FCC restrictions on local station ownership that same year — clearing the path for further consolidation.
The pattern spans national cable, local broadcast, print, and social media — and no equivalent consolidation is happening on the left. For decades, conservatives argued they were locked out of mainstream media. What is emerging now is not a correction but a structural realignment, one in which media ownership, regulatory leverage, and political access converge in the same hands. Every major deal documented here requires federal approval from the administration that stands to benefit from favorable coverage.
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