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How David Ellison Becomes Goliath

Buying Warner Bros. Discovery would give Paramount 150 million streaming subscribers and big theatrical I.P. But scale alone won’t turn the Ellisons’ Hollywood foray into a legit Netflix rival. Could two studios become more than the sum of their parts?

David Ellison
It remains to be seen whether Ellison can actually transform Paramount by focusing on tech, or if that’s just the naive fantasy of a Silicon Valley billionaire heir. Photo: Joseph Okpako/WireImage
Julia Alexander
September 16, 2025

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You’d think that David Ellison might be a little more apprehensive about acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery, given the somewhat ill-fated history of the Warners media assets. Since 1990, they’ve passed from Time Inc. to AOL, back to Time Warner, then to AT&T, and finally to Discovery Communications, only to become potential fish food for the newly merged Paramount Skydance. After all, it was only a few years ago that Warner Discovery C.E.O David Zaslav fantasized about challenging Netflix by combining populist networks like HGTV and TLC with the prestige of HBO. Now here comes Ellison, with his own Hollywood dream and a nearly unfathomable family fortune, chasing even greater scale.