On Wednesday afternoon, I drove from the Hollywood Hills down to the Paramount lot on Melrose to spend a couple hours in the company of Paramount Skydance chief and current media “It” boy David Ellison, his charismatic and self-assured investment partner Gerry Cardinale, his new entourage of direct reports—Jeff Shell, George Cheeks, Cindy Holland, etcetera—as well as a few dozen Hollywood journalists who’d been invited to ask on-the-record questions of the top brass and then dine with them over La Scala salads. (A tip of the hat to my partner Matt Belloni, who held Ellison’s ear for quite some time over lunch, for identifying the provenance of this culinary olive branch).

The L.A. press event followed Ellison’s inaugural company-wide town hall that morning, and came just a week after a similar media meet-and-greet in New York on the day the deal closed, which itself followed David & Co.’s visit to CBS News for the 9 a.m. editorial call. This marathon good will tour seemed designed to convey optimism and stamina, as well as a certain degree of radical transparency, which worked only up to a point. Reporters have been especially preoccupied with Ellison’s lack of clarity around whether he had, in fact, offered $20 million worth of free advertising time to Trump to help shepherd the deal across the finish line. Ellison declined to comment in both cities, stating that he did not want to “politicize” the company—a comment that hardly answered the question.

Naturally, he preferred to discuss the opportunities ahead: building a best-in-class streaming service on the back of Oracle tech, “restoring Paramount as the number one destination for the most talented artists and filmmakers in the world,” keeping Tom Cruise and Taylor Sheridan happy, and expanding the live sports offering, starting with his ballsy $7.7 billion deal to secure the complete package of UFC rights. Like the last David to acquire a once-illustrious entertainment empire, Ellison is in his honeymoon phase: here to scale the company, save Hollywood, take on Netflix, play the hero… before the bitching about layoffs starts, mistakes are made, and it all becomes clear that this is harder than it looks.

Of course, this David is embarking on a very different mission. In retrospect, Warner Bros. Discovery’s fate under David Zaslav was preordained both by its extraordinary debt burden and Zaz’s own pedigree: a basic-cable guy from the Welch school who cashed fat checks for cutting costs but just couldn’t seem to increase revenue. Despite the rhetoric about restoring the company and the town to its glory days—reinstalling Jack Warner’s desk and refurbishing Robert Evans’s Beverly Hills estate—the real point was getting WBD to the next deal, even if it had to happen in parts.

Ellison starts his own hero’s journey from a decidedly different position: born exponentially wealthier than everyone else in the game and reared in his father Larry’s tech entrepreneurialism and win-at-all-costs ethos. He didn’t have to buy this company and, after sitting with him and his new charges for a couple hours, I’m not really sure I can tell you why he did. But what is certainly clear is that his vow to make this $8.8 billion company competitive with the likes of Netflix and Amazon is more than mere pablum—and, indeed, betrays future strategic moves that traditional Hollywood executives might never countenance, including his family’s potential acquisition of TikTok.

The road from here to there will be hard, obviously. On the tech side, as I have noted before, David is effectively trying to reverse-engineer the process that Netflix, YouTube, and other tech companies used to become creative businesses—and, as you may have noticed, there are precisely zero examples of creative firms transforming into tech giants. Will Ellison’s kitchen cabinet of media people be able to execute his quixotic technological vision, whatever it may be? Or will they get distracted by synergies, ad sales, sports rights renewals, talent hassles, and whatever shit comes a cropper next at CBS News? History, unfortunately, points to the latter, even if we are in uncharted territory.

Nevertheless, that’s the play: to reimagine the media portfolio through nontraditional channels and integrate it into a new, state-of-the-art streaming service on the back of Oracle’s cloud technology. You can mock it, or admire it, but when Gerry pipes up from the back and tells reporters, “I’m betting my firm and my career on this deal,” it’s hard to dismiss the sincerity of the conviction. (Although, yes, Gerry will be fine regardless…)

To underpin this transformation, there will be cuts—and lots of them. In L.A., David was asked how he intended to make Paramount the premier destination for creatives while also promising financial discipline. Obviously, he saw those as two different buckets, he said: the areas where Paramount needed to invest; and the investments that needed to be scaled back or undone—starting with the promised $2 billion in cost savings. Of course, one need only listen to his words and look at his actions to understand which is which: Stephen Colbert was losing $40 million a year. A third sequel to Top Gun, which grossed $1.5 billion last time around, “is a massive priority.” Maybe at some level, if you take out the sentimentality, this isn’t rocket science.

Unsurprisingly, every question David fields about CBS News these days is tied to his commitment to its editorial independence—and he has a very well-rehearsed answer for that, replete with strained paeans to the legacy of Walter Cronkite. But the more pressing question is about his commitment to the business, itself.

Despite the rhetoric, David obviously didn’t buy Paramount for CBS News and, frankly, I think he and Shell would have been happier if they weren’t forced to inherit it. (Alas, that’s the nature of this sort of as is, where is deal…) As you may have noticed, his would-be competitors at Netflix and Amazon aren’t in the news business because they have no interest in tethering themselves to declining business models and preposterously outmoded formats. To look at Colbert’s cancellation and question David’s commitment to journalistic independence is to miss the point. As newly minted billionaires Trey Parker and Matt Stone know, you can make all the tiny-dick jokes you want about the president if you can turn a profit. Losing tens of millions is definitionally not funny.

David isn’t really going to invest in CBS News. He’s going to right-size it, Cheddarize it, bring down talent salaries, and require smaller teams to work on smaller budgets. CBS News will endure—indeed, journalists there may be surprised to learn how much journalism can still be done without hair and makeup, without teams of producers, researchers, and camera operators, without multimillionaire morning anchors—and, eventually, without them. In time, new workarounds will be found—perhaps a licensing deal with CNN, so CBS doesn’t have to employ its own foreign correspondents (that network could use some new revenue lines, too).

The real tragedy for CBS News will come later, when this transformative technological moment is a little further along, and the news division wakes up to find out that it hadn’t even been asked to make the transformations necessary to keep pace. At one point on Wednesday afternoon, David began expressing his enthusiasm over how, in three years, real-time A.I. would open up vast new frontiers in storytelling and allow his children to have extended conversations with the Paw Patrol puppies (he likened this revolution to the creation of Pixar, but I think he’s underselling it).

If that is indeed the future David envisions, the grown-ups certainly won’t be reading the news on CBSNews.com or sticking around ’til 6:30 p.m. to hear from Maurice DuBois and John Dickerson. One of the notable ironies of this past week, in fact, was Ellison and Cardinale’s enthusiasm that their unprecedented UFC deal would land the league airtime on CBS—a network that they presumably imagine as a hub for the NFL, the Sheridan-verse, and now the octagon. But for a company so infatuated by its past, it’s kinda healthy that the new leadership is leaning headlong into the future rather than paying any more lip service to the ghost of Cronkite, who last signed off nearly 45 years ago.