Over the last month, as David Ellison has settled into control of Paramount, a new conventional wisdom seems to have coalesced around a guy who, by dint of his relative youth and centibillionaire father, might otherwise have been written off as a nepo baby of hyperbolic proportions. David is smart, his friends and fellow executives will assure you. He gets the business. And, most notably, he plays to win—or, as Mark Shapiro put it to me, he is “an assassin when it comes to winning.” But as John Malone made clear in his recent interview with the Times, all things can be true. Malone, who met with David in Sun Valley, said he found him both “very bright” and “pretty arrogant.” But, in the ultimate benediction, the aging cable cowboy assured all that he would “bet on that guy.”