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David Day One: The Ellison Era at Paramount Begins

Touring CBS News and making nice with 60 Minutes, Ellison met a media firing squad and unveiled a plan to leverage the tech prowess of his father’s Oracle and others to compete with Silicon Valley. Sounds great, but how?

david ellison
Remember, Ellison and his advisors have been strategizing this Day One plan for more than a year, so everything that was said or done was carefully choreographed. Photo: Taylor Hill/FilmMagic
Matthew Belloni
August 8, 2025

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By the time this hits your inbox, David Ellison and his inner circle will have finished up the big closing dinner to celebrate Day One of New Paramount. At the Nobu in Midtown—because of course it was held there… the Ellisons are investors in a few outposts of the sushi chain, though not in this one—the new owner-operator of Paramount toasted incoming leaders of CBS, CBS News, the Paramount streaming services and movie studio, plus company president Jeff Shell, deal architect Gerry Cardinale, and a bunch of bankers and lawyers who worked for two arduous and often ridiculous years on an $8 billion transaction that, if all goes well, could serve as a blueprint for how to save a 100-year-old Hollywood studio in the age of Big Tech. Or something like that.