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If you’ve met with David Ellison lately, you’d think it’s business as usual for the Skydance Media C.E.O. and wannabe owner of Paramount Global. Since Ellison and Shari Redstone reached an agreement on the $8 billion merger in July, he’s been dutifully doing those integration meetings, learning about the scale and structure of the business, and offering his opinions as if all was going according to plan. (By the way, it’s likely gonna be more than the $2 billion in cuts/layoffs that Ellison promised.) Last week, Ellison got together again with Taylor Sheridan, the company’s most important hitmaker. That goes for the rest of the incoming Paramount crew, too. Jeff Shell, Ellison’s No. 2 when (or if) the deal closes, has been in the New York offices of Paramount a bunch lately. He and Chris McCarthy, one of the company’s three current co-C.E.O.s we’re still not calling the Pep Boys, have been meeting with advertising holding companies—which is a bit awkward because McCarthy likely will not stay with Paramount post-close. George Cheeks, a co-C.E.O. who is probably staying, has been particularly active, along with Ellison and Shell, on CBS issues, including settling the recent standoff with Nielsen. Cindy Holland, who will run the streaming business, has been identifying projects for Paramount. And Dana Goldberg, the Skydance film exec who will take over Paramount Pictures, has been telegraphing her plans to the talent agencies—plans that do not include the third Paramount co-C.E.O., Brian Robbins. Also, the town’s worst-kept secret: Melissa Zukerman, communications advisor for Ellison and RedBird’s Gerry Cardinale, has been meeting with Paramount P.R. teams and is expected to take on some role at the merged company. So pretty standard for a change-of-control period. Except for one tiny thing: the batshit chaos and political uncertainty hanging over the entire Skydance-Paramount deal thanks to the new Trump administration. If you ask Ellison about whether the transaction will close, he’ll probably tell you, as he did to one source of mine recently, that it’s “not a matter of if, just when.” And that’s probably still true. But when could be a big problem. Team Ellison once thought they’d get the keys to the Melrose Avenue gate in the first quarter of this year. Now even the first half of ’25 is looking iffy. With Trump suing CBS for $10 billion over the supposedly deceptive Kamala Harris 60 Minutes interview, and the president repeatedly saying that the network “should lose its license” (it’s actually the stations that are licensed by the government, not the network, but whatever), this thing has turned into one of the stranger and least predictable merger reviews in recent history. The drama heated up this week when the F.C.C., which shares authority with the D.O.J. to review media M&A, opened a public comment docket over the 60 Minutes “scandal,” which was revealed as not really a scandal when the F.C.C. posted the unedited transcript and it showed very normal and not-deceptive edits. Regardless, Brendan Carr, Trump’s pick for F.C.C. chair, has been making noise about policing censorship and media bias, and he knows all about Trump’s obsession with the media. For that reason, some have concluded that Carr will cite the bias issue exposed in the 60 Minutes docket as a reason to kill the transfer of the CBS licenses—and thus, the Skydance deal. But that’s not totally accurate. It’s true that the comment period on the 60 Minutes docket goes until March 24, after which Carr could hold the inquiry open as long as he likes. But that is a separate matter from the F.C.C.’s Paramount-Skydance review. Carr could have connected the 60 Minutes probe to the Paramount transaction via the already active docket for the merger, but he didn’t do that. He chose not to, even after the Center for American Rights, which brought the initial complaint about media bias, urged him to make that link. The docket for the merger is actually complete, meaning the F.C.C. can approve the deal whenever the chair decides to do so, regardless of whether the 60 Minutes inquiry is still ongoing.

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So the new move doesn’t mean the F.C.C. is more (or less) inclined to block the Paramount deal or extract draconian concessions, like requiring the sale of CBS or bringing in a more “unbiased” partner for CBS News, as has been suggested. As an F.C.C. commissioner, Carr actually has a pretty long history of criticizing lengthy reviews and those exact kinds of conditions. In 2017, for instance, he agreed with the approval of a telecom merger with limited conditions because “the agency will only impose merger conditions that are narrowly tailored to remedy transaction-specific harms. We will not be using them as a vehicle to extract extraneous concessions from parties.” A sale of CBS to remedy an editing gaffe on a single 60 Minutes interview would seem pretty extraneous, even to Trump or to the Texas legislator who called the situation “the biggest scandal in broadcast history” (which it is definitely not). But, Rowings noted, being in control of the timing does mean that Carr can make Ellison and Redstone sweat out a longer wait. In a Fox News interview in November, he at least hinted that he would connect 60 Minutes to the merger. “There’s … a news-distortion complaint at the F.C.C. still, having to do with CBS, and CBS has a transaction before the F.C.C.,” Carr said. “And I’m pretty confident that that news-distortion complaint over the CBS 60 Minutes transcript is something that’s likely to arise in the context of the F.C.C.’s review of that transaction.” Would Carr slow-walk the merger? Redstone seems to think so, which is why she’s said to be contemplating paying off Trump—sorry, settling the $10 billion case. Even if it’s an eight-figure check, that’s a relatively small tax on getting herself paid billions by Skydance. That might mean risking an upheaval at CBS News if she follows Bob Iger’s lead at Disney-ABC News and capitulates to Trump. But that would largely be Ellison’s problem, not hers. Given the Disney precedent, maybe Redstone would have tried to settle with Trump even if there weren’t an $8 billion deal hanging in the balance. But she’s definitely incentivized now that Trump and Carr have this leverage over her. All the while, Ellison must watch from afar, adhering to the S.E.C. rules prohibiting him from exerting control over Paramount while the sale is pending. If this thing is blocked or drags on, there’s always the chance that Redstone could walk away. That deadline is in April, subject to two automatic 90-day extensions. But doing so would risk the $400 million breakup fee Paramount must pay and the millions that Ellison loaned Redstone as part of the deal, so Shari is highly incentivized to see this through. In the meantime, though, the Paramount assets are just sitting there treading water. On July 7, when the merger was officially announced, the Paramount stock was at $11.81. Today, it closed at 10.84, a roughly 10 percent drop during a period when the Nasdaq rose more than 7 percent overall. Also during that time, Disney-ABC swiped the Grammy Awards from CBS-Paramount+, which endured a months-long standoff with Nielsen over the cost of the ratings service. Paramount’s streaming strategy still isn’t clear, even as rivals pull away and make moves to limit the damage from failing television networks. The Paramount movie studio is stuck in neutral; it’s got a current hit with Sonic the Hedgehog 3, but Gladiator II failed to match rival studio tentpoles over the holidays, and it whiffed in its Oscar campaign when September 5, Better Man, and Gladiator II failed to score major nominations. The longer the merger drags on, the more damage it inflicts on the company that Ellison will inherit. We saw this with the Time Warner-AT&T saga, where two years of fighting the first Trump administration sacrificed precious time that allowed competitors to jump ahead in the streaming wars. That’s the cost of these Trump shenanigans—and Trump and Carr know it. The irony here is that Larry Ellison, the mega-billionaire and Trump supporter whose money is largely financing the Paramount acquisition, is probably as ideologically aligned with the president as any possible owner of CBS besides Don Jr. Which is why the most likely outcome here seems to be Carr keeping Shari and David in a sauna for a few months, Shari writing an embarrassingly fat check so Trump can extract his pound of flesh and scream that he was right all along, and Carr approving the deal with a public statement vowing to monitor and police media bias now and into the future, ultimately giving Larry and his son what they want.