Coffee Break: Ellison Empire Beseiged On All Fronts | naked capitalism

Menu

Home

About

Archives

Bloggers

Policies

Documents

Limited Partnership Agreements

Contact

Recent Items

Logotherapy in an Age of Frustration: Finding Meaning Through the Creative Act - 07/30/2026 - Curro Jimenez

Baby Busts and GDP Booms: Demographic Change and the Macroeconomy - 07/30/2026 - Yves Smith

Links 7/30/2026 - 07/30/2026 - Conor Gallagher

Iran War: Jordan Strike Shows Iran Intensifying War to Exhaust US Economy and Military; Trump Takes Bait by Retaliating - 07/30/2026 - Yves Smith

Rob Urie – Empire Versus Civilization: The US Is Now Officially a Pariah State - 07/30/2026 - Yves Smith

Satyajit Das: American Greatness? - 07/30/2026 - Yves Smith

Coffee Break: Ellison Empire Beseiged On All Fronts - 07/29/2026 - Nat Wilson Turner

China and War - 07/29/2026 - Yves Smith

Links 7/29/2026 - 07/29/2026 - Conor Gallagher

Things have only gotten worse for the Ellison family tech and media empire in the last week as they face mounting legal and financial pressure on all fronts.

Note: Post is as updated as it’s going to get. Enjoy! Thanks for your patience.

I’m the cautious sort so I put a "?" at the end of the headline of last week’s piece on this topic: "Oracle’s Exploding Debt and Plumeting Stock Price Threaten Paramount Media Empire?", and in doing so appear to have violated Betteridge’s law of headlines.

Sorry about that, but the Ellison family media empire is the kind of vampire that has to be killed at the crossroads at daybreak with a silver sword, decapitated, have its mouth stuffed with garlic and its brain pulled out via the nose Egyptian-style before I’ll believe it’s dead or even mortally wounded.

Just talking metaphorically about a corporation here, no threats of violence intended in any way shape or form in case anyone from DHS or the EU is reading this.

But let’s get down to brass tacks because the fact set has only gotten worse and worse.

The Story Thus Far

The elderly Larry Ellison (and since Larry famously thinks he’s God I’ll quote John Lennon speaking of the Apostles in 1980) and his thick, ordinary nepobaby failson David and the empire they hastily began assembling in 2025 appear to be in deep trouble on a number of fronts.

To review (for links check the list of related posts at the end of this one):

Larry Ellison is the CEO or Oracle and reportedly owns about 40% of its stock.

Larry Ellison is sometimes described as the single largest private donor to the Israeli "Defense" Forces.

August 2025: Larry financed the $8 billion acquisition of Paramount by his son David’s company Skydance in August 2025.

September 2025: Oracle stock, and Ellison’s on-paper net worth exploded when he announced a massive investment in data centers in partnership with OpenAI. This briefly made Ellison the world’s 2nd richest human.

October 2025: Paramount Skydance announces the acquisition of Bari Weiss’ blog The Free Press for $150 million and hired her as editor-in-chief of CBS News.

January 2026: Oracle leads a consortium of investors in the $14 billion takeover of American TikTok which its Chinese owners were forced to spin off. Oracle’s stake is reported to be $2.2 billion.

In February 2026, Paramount Skydance "won a bidding war" to acquire WBD (Warner Bros Discovery) for $110.9 billion after triggering a bidding war with Netflix that grossly inflated the sale price.

At least three Gulf State sovereign wealth funds (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE) pledged a combined $24 billion to back the Paramount Skydance bid for WBD.

Larry Ellison "irrevocably personally guaranteed" the WBD purchase with $45.7 billion to back the deal’s equity financing.

Multiple antitrust suits have been filed on behalf of consumer, labor, and shareholder interests against the Paramount-WBD merger.

Oracle’s stock price has plunged by more than half since its late 2025 peak and its bond yields are nearing junk bond territory.

Now let’s get to this week’s developments; they got it bad, and that ain’t good.

We’ll start with the long arm of the law that’s got the Ellisons all tangled up.

Lawsuits Freeze Deal

From the Hollywood Reporter on July 24th:

Paramount has agreed not to close its $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery until the court decides whether the deal violates antitrust laws.

The studio, in a court document filed on Friday alongside the coalition of states looking to block the merger, said it will hold off on consummating the acquisition until June 2027 or five days after the court issues a ruling on the case, whichever is earlier.

For Paramount, the delay in closing the deal may prove costly. Under the merger agreement, Warners shareholders are owed roughly $650 million per quarter or $6.9 million per day if the deal isn’t done by Sept. 30.

The truce comes a day after U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín issued an extension of a temporary restraining order barring Paramount from closing until...