David Ellison is also the son of Larry Ellison, who founded the business-software behemoth Oracle and is the fifth-richest man in the world.
What is less obvious: Will Larry Ellison’s tech background — or his company — help his son if he ends up owning a TV-and-movie company?
Yes, say some people in the Ellisons’ orbit. At least the ones talking to reporters covering the blow-by-blow of the deal.
Sometimes the connection is a little vague: The New York Times reports that Redstone is “encouraged by the access to capital and tech know-how” the connection with the Ellison family affords.
Sometimes it is more specific: In addition to helping finance the deal, Larry Ellison “would also potentially provide Paramount Global with access to artificial intelligence software and other data technology from Oracle,” CNBC reports.
And sometimes it’s somewhere in between: Over at Puck, the insidery newsletter company, reporters speculate that a Paramount “powered by Oracle is an intriguing idea” and relay that some industry sources believe Oracle “will power the service.”
But none of that makes much sense.
It’s reasonable to believe that being the son of Larry Ellison gives David Ellison access to lots of smart people in tech (though Larry Ellison’s $1 billion investment in Elon Musk’s Twitter also shows the limits of being connected in tech — sometimes your connections make terrible decisions). But there are lots of people in tech happy to offer advice and strategy to anyone who runs a big Hollywood studio. (Reps for David Ellison declined to comment; Oracle PR did not respond to an email request for comment.)
And as far as the idea of an Oracle-Paramount tie-up? If you squint, you can imagine Oracle, which sells stuff like enterprise software and cloud services, selling some of its tech to Paramount instead of the services the company is already using.
Then again, if Paramount wanted to use that stuff, it could do that already. And even though Larry Ellison is Oracle’s chairman, he couldn’t offer the services his publicly traded company sells to his son’s company via some kind of sweetheart deal. Not without causing all kinds of legal headaches, at least.
Most important: The reason that Paramount is in play, at a steep discount from where it was just a few years ago, isn’t its tech strategy or resources. It’s a structural issue: Its core TV-and-movie business is under pressure because the entire TV-and-movie business is under pressure. And investors don’t think it has enough scale to compete with the likes of Disney and Netflix.
David Ellison helped Tom Cruise bring “Top Gun: Maverick” to screens a couple of years ago, and that megahit has bought him a lot of credibility in Hollywood. Maybe that, plus some aggressive investment, can help rescue Paramount. But it’s hard to believe his dad’s tech will have much to do with it, one way or another.
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