Hollywood

Ellison’s Empire Sends Hollywood a Message About Israel

As Warner Bros. passes to David Ellison, we asks why the Ellisons are buying studios, newsrooms and TikTok, and what it tells Hollywood about criticising Israel.

Husam Sam Asi 1 October 2026, 11:53

Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, whose fortune backs his son David's Paramount, on stage in 2009. Photo: <a href='https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Larry_Ellison_on_stage.jpg'>Steve Walker</a>, via Wikimedia Commons

On 6 October, Warner Bros., the studio that gave the world Casablanca, will belong to David Ellison. A US federal judge cleared the last obstacle on 30 September, approving a settlement with 12 states that obliges the merged Paramount and Warner Bros. to release at least 30 films a year in cinemas. Most of the coverage has dwelt on release quotas, streaming and a price of more than $110 billion. The questions that matter more are what the Ellisons want with all this, and what their ownership tells everyone in Hollywood who has ever wanted to speak about Gaza.

An empire of screens

Count what one family now controls. In 2025 David Ellison’s Skydance, backed by the fortune of his father, the Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, bought Paramount and CBS for $8 billion. In January, Oracle took a 15 per cent stake in the joint venture that now runs TikTok in the US, alongside Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi’s MGX, with Oracle overseeing the copy of the app’s algorithm. Next week Warner Bros., HBO and CNN join the portfolio.

David Ellison’s own explanation is about scale. The combined company will have “more than 200 million” streaming subscribers, he said in March, “positioning us to compete effectively with the leading streaming services”. His critics see another logic. Senator Elizabeth Warren called a Paramount-Warner merger a “dangerous concentration of power”. The media watchdog FAIR warned that the Ellisons controlling CBS, CNN and TikTok “would be dangerous for democracy”, adding: “given their closeness to the Trump regime, that seems to be the point.” Donald Trump had said of TikTok: “I’d like Larry to buy it.”

Another leader took a close interest. Meeting pro-Israel influencers at Israel’s consulate in New York in September 2025, Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel’s most important weapons “are on social media” and called the TikTok sale “the most important purchase going on right now”, The New Arab and Responsible Statecraft reported.

Where the Ellisons stand

The family’s loyalties are public. In 2017 Larry Ellison gave $16.6 million to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, then the largest single gift in its history, to fund facilities at a training campus for Israeli infantry units, JTA reported. In 2021 Netanyahu holidayed on Ellison’s private Hawaiian island of Lanai, and Haaretz reported that Ellison had offered him a seat on Oracle’s board, an offer Netanyahu denied receiving. That same year Oracle’s then chief executive, Safra Catz, said of the company’s staff: “if they don’t agree with our mission to support the State of Israel then maybe we aren’t the right company for them,” as The Intercept has recalled.

David Ellison insists he keeps politics out of the business. “I’m not going to be in the position of ever making political statements. We’re an entertainment company first,” he said last October, according to +972 Magazine. Yet in September 2025, four days after Film Workers for Palestine published a pledge by more than 4,000 actors and directors, among them Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Javier Bardem and Joaquin Phoenix, to refuse work with Israeli film institutions they consider complicit in abuses against Palestinians, Paramount became the first major studio to condemn it. “Silencing individual creative artists based on their nationality does not promote better understanding or advance the cause of peace,” the studio said. The organisers replied that the pledge is aimed at institutions. Warner Bros. Discovery followed in October, declaring that such a boycott “violates our policies”.

Two months later Variety reported that Paramount keeps a list of talent it will not work with because they are deemed “overtly antisemitic”, “xenophobic” or “homophobic”, the Times of Israel and the Jewish Chronicle noted. No names on it have been confirmed. Ellison has said he wants to be “in the business of speaking to everybody”, KOMO News reported.

The newsroom

The clearest view of the family’s priorities is CBS News. In October 2025 Paramount paid $150 million for The Free Press and made its founder, Bari Weiss, editor-in-chief of CBS News. Haaretz described her as a journalist who “built her career attacking Israel’s critics”, beginning with a campaign at Columbia University against professors accused of intimidating pro-Israel students. She has called herself a “Zionist fanatic”, as The New Republic and Zeteo have noted. According to Axios, she is expected to oversee news editorial at CNN as well once the merger closes.

Independent outlets have documented what followed. When CBS cut jobs in late 2025, a staffer told Variety that the cuts “disproportionally hit” journalists critical of Israel; among those let go was the veteran correspondent Debora Patta, months after the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, accused her of selectively editing an interview with him. In April Zeteo reported that Claire Day, CBS’s London bureau chief for nearly 25 years, was leaving after clashes over Middle East coverage, with Weiss reportedly complaining that the bureau was so biased against Israel “they might as well be Hamas”. The network’s president, Tom Cibrowski, called it “a mutual decision”. Zeteo also reported, citing four sources, that Weiss made last-minute changes to a CBS Sunday Morning story about Israeli archaeological digs in the occupied West Bank. CBS replied: “We aim to inform audiences, not satisfy story subjects.”

On 31 August, 11 days before the 25th anniversary of the attacks of 11 September 2001, CBS News published the headline “For Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, Sept. 11 commemoration invites scrutiny of past remarks”. El-Sayed, a Muslim and the Democratic nominee for the US Senate in Michigan, has called 9/11 “a terrible attack on our country”. The newsletter Status reported that Weiss had personally pushed for the headline to mention his deleted tweets about the attacks, and it was rewritten to do so. Critics called the story anti-Muslim. A person familiar with it told The New Republic that Weiss “did edit the headline and complimented the story”, and rejected the charge of bigotry.

In July, CBS News New York reported that “thousands of 9/11 victims’ families” were asking New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, also a Muslim, to stay away from the anniversary ceremony. The New York Post report behind the claim cited “at least 300” families. After the independent newsletter Popular Information asked questions, CBS removed the line without an editor’s note and later aired a segment with a 9/11 family member who backed the mayor’s attendance.

What I have seen in Hollywood

None of this surprises me. Over the years I have met nearly all the bosses of Hollywood’s studios, and they were all pro-Israel. A studio chairman once told me, as I wrote in 2016, that defending freedom of speech was no part of his job: “Hollywood is not about that; it’s a business.” During the 2014 war on Gaza, I wrote that very few Hollywood celebrities dared to say anything for fear of being labelled antisemites, and that those who did, Mark Ruffalo among them, faced aggressive attacks.

Ellison fits a long pattern. What he adds is concentration. One family, whose patriarch has funded Israel’s army, will own two of Hollywood’s five major studios, two national news networks and, through Oracle, a stake in the venture that runs TikTok’s algorithm. With the boycott statement and the reported list, Paramount has already shown where its lines are drawn. In my view that sends a message to every actor, writer and director in Hollywood: criticising Israel now carries a cost at one of the four big studios left. This week UKScreen reported how Israeli officials have threatened to strip the directors of NAZA of their citizenship. In Hollywood the penalty is quieter: the call that never comes.

Hollywood did resist. In April more than 1,000 film-makers and actors, among them Jane Fonda, Bryan Cranston, Joaquin Phoenix, Glenn Close, Ben Stiller, Yorgos Lanthimos, Denis Villeneuve and David Chase, signed an open letter opposing the merger and warning of fewer jobs and “less choice for audiences”. The Writers Guild of America sued to block it, then settled. Their case rested on competition, which is what antitrust law covers. Phoenix and Lanthimos had also signed the Film Workers for Palestine pledge.

Arab money, Ellison’s editors

There is a final irony. Sovereign funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi are putting $24 billion into the takeover and may hold up to 49.5 per cent of the equity. Paramount says they get no board seats or votes, and the US regulator found they would have no influence. Arab money will help pay for newsrooms run by one of America’s most outspoken defenders of Israel, with no say over what those newsrooms report.

Ellison promises balance. “Editorial independence will absolutely be maintained. It’s maintained at CBS. It’ll be maintained at CNN,” he told CNBC in March. “We want to be in the truth business.” The settlement adds a News Editorial Independence Board to hear complaints of bias at CBS and CNN. Hollywood’s actors, writers and directors have no such board. They will judge his promise by who gets hired.

Sources: +972 Magazine; The Intercept; Zeteo (London bureau); Zeteo (CBS Sunday Morning); Popular Information; Reality Tea; The New Republic (El-Sayed); The New Republic (Weiss); Salon; TV Insider; FAIR; Responsible Statecraft; The New Arab; Haaretz; Benzinga (reporting Haaretz); JTA; Times of Israel; Jewish Chronicle; Ynet; TheWrap; Associated Press (via CP24); Associated Press; ABC News; ABC News/Associated Press (FCC); Engadget; Axios; The Week; Deadline; Variety Australia; NBC News; KOMO News; That Park Place.