I’ve spent years working in Hollywood, and Hollywood has spent years laying me off. If you work in this town, you already know the churn: one quarter you’re on a studio lot, the next you’re a freelancer waiting for calls that never come. That’s the nature of the business.
But what makes this moment different, and why it hits me so close to home, is that for once the churn isn’t just about budgets or ratings. It’s about ownership.
For decades, Hollywood has been owned by faceless conglomerates: telecom giants, media holding companies, sprawling corporations where film and TV were just another division on the balance sheet. That structure created the illusion that no one person really controlled Hollywood. Decisions felt spread across executives, producers, advertisers, affiliates, and stars. It was messy, corporate, and impersonal.
Larry Ellison is breaking that illusion.
So far in this series, we’ve traced how deep the rabbit hole goes. The Programmer and the Panopticon showed us Ellison building the surveillance infrastructure. The Bones of Surveillance revealed how he exported those systems globally. The Netanyahu Connection exposed how he turned Israeli battlefields into his testing ground.
And Part 4? This one hits closest to home. This is where Hollywood itself gets conscripted into Larry’s empire.
The Proof of Concept: Paramount Falls
There were things about the Paramount-Skydance deal that never sat right with me. Plenty of people told me, “This is just how mergers look. It’s business.” But I pulled the filings, lined up the dates, and started tracing who moved when. When I laid the dates side by side, the pattern was impossible to miss.
October 29, 2024: Paramount’s merger paperwork was refiled with the FCC. Up until that point, Larry Ellison’s name was everywhere; through three different Pinnacle Media shell entities, he controlled 77.5 percent of the stake. Then, in this refiling, everything shifted. David Ellison was suddenly listed as having 100 percent of the voting rights. Larry stayed the financier, still supplying three-quarters of the cash, but now he was described only as a “backer” rather than a controller. The money never left. What disappeared was Larry’s direct accountability.
October 30: The very next day, Donald Trump sued CBS for ten billion dollars over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, the one where she was pressed about Israel and Gaza. And he didn’t file the lawsuit in New York or Washington, where CBS actually operates. He filed it in Amarillo, Texas, a single-judge division where every case goes to Matthew Kacsmaryk, one of Trump’s most reliable allies on the bench.
Think about that sequence. On Tuesday, Larry’s name comes off the filings. On Wednesday, Trump sues CBS in the friendliest court he could find. Those are not unrelated events. Scrubbing Larry’s name shielded him from being pulled into the case. On paper, David was now the responsible party. In practice, Larry’s billions were still driving the deal.
Three weeks later, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr went on Fox News and said that the complaint against CBS was likely to come up in the merger review. That was the regulator himself linking a political lawsuit to whether a media company sale would be approved.
From there, the cadence is unmistakable:
July 2, 2025: CBS settles. The twenty-billion dollar demand ends at sixteen million—less than one percent. Trump publicly brags about side deals and ad commitments.
July 15: David Ellison meets with Carr at the FCC.
July 17: Stephen Colbert goes on air and calls the settlement “a big fat bribe.” Two days later, his cancellation is announced.
July 24: The FCC approves the merger in a party-line vote.
The approval came with strings attached. CBS had to accept a conservative ombudsman, dismantle its DEI programs, and build “viewpoint diversity” mandates into its editorial structure. Those were political concessions written directly into the newsroom.
The fallout came fast. Bill Owens, executive producer of 60 Minutes for nearly two decades, resigned, saying he could no longer run the show the way he always had. Wendy McMahon, president of CBS News, left weeks later after clashing with corporate interference. Norah O’Donnell was moved off the Evening News ahead of schedule. And Colbert, the most visible Trump critic in late night, was gone.
This is also why the “just business” defense collapses. In Hollywood, networks hold the TV upfronts every May; when they pitch advertisers and sell commercial space for the year ahead. If CBS had planned to cancel The Late Show for financial reasons, May was the time. They would have announced Colbert’s final season, marketed it as a farewell, and sold ad spots at a premium. Instead, they stayed silent in May, blindsided everyone in July, and left millions on the table. In this industry, that isn’t bad planning. It’s unthinkable.
Larry’s name comes off the filings. Trump files the lawsuit the next day. Carr signals that the merger is hostage to that complaint. CBS settles. Colbert is silenced. The FCC hands Ellison the approval with political conditions built in. That is not coincidence. It is the proof of concept.
The Megaphone: Local News Under Siege
To understand what happens next, you have to understand how television in America actually works. It isn’t just studios making shows and networks airing them. There are two layers: the studios that create programming, and the affiliates that beam it into your home.
Paramount owns CBS, which means they control national shows like 60 Minutes and The Late Show. But CBS doesn’t own every local CBS station around the country. In most cities, those stations are run by outside companies (affiliates) who license the right to carry CBS content. Same with ABC, NBC, and Fox. When you turn on the evening news in Milwaukee, Phoenix, or Atlanta, what you’re watching is a mix of local reporting plus national shows funneled through these affiliate contracts.
This is why affiliates matter: they are the pipes. Whoever controls the pipes controls how content actually reaches American households. And because local anchors are still the most trusted news source in the country, shaping the affiliates means shaping how millions of voters understand politics — especially in the swing states that tip elections.
Now look at what’s happening at Nexstar. Already the largest owner of local TV stations in the country, Nexstar has filed to buy Tegna for $6.2 billion. That deal would give them 265 stations, covering close to 80 percent of U.S. households. And the geography isn’t random. The combined footprint runs straight through Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona; the very states that decide the presidency.
Here’s where Ellison comes in. Oracle provides the cloud infrastructure that powers Nexstar’s operations across hundreds of stations. When you’re managing content distribution, advertising placement, and audience data for 265 local stations, you need serious backend systems. Oracle isn’t just a vendor here — they’re the digital nervous system that makes Nexstar’s empire possible.
Until recently, that kind of reach would have been illegal. FCC rules capped any single broadcaster at 39 percent of the national audience. That was the guardrail to prevent one company from dominating local airwaves. But FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has said openly that he’s willing to waive (even eliminate) that cap. In other words, the rule that was supposed to stop exactly this kind of national chokehold is now negotiable.
And when you control the infrastructure that runs the stations, you don’t need to own them directly. You just need them dependent on your systems.
September 17, 2025: The whole sequence played out in less than seven hours.
1:00 p.m. ET: Carr goes on Benny Johnson’s podcast and warns that local ABC stations should “pre-empt” Jimmy Kimmel or “there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
6:11 p.m.: Nexstar, which owns 32 ABC affiliates and is trying to acquire Tegna’s 13 more, announces it will pre-empt *Jimmy Kimmel Live!* “for the foreseeable future.”
~6:30 p.m.: ABC itself (Disney) announces Kimmel’s suspension “indefinitely.”
7:00 p.m.: Carr thanks Nexstar publicly for “doing the right thing.” Minutes later, Sinclair, which owns 31 ABC affiliates, follows suit.
Do the math: Nexstar, Sinclair, and Tegna together control 63 of ABC’s 205 affiliates; about 37 percent of the entire network’s footprint. That means more than a third of ABC’s local stations were in the hands of companies with every incentive to appease the FCC.
When Carr threatened, Nexstar obeyed, Sinclair piled on, and Disney pulled the plug. It wasn’t organic outrage. It was regulatory pressure, affiliate leverage, and corporate compliance working in sync. And Oracle’s systems were processing every step—tracking which affiliates complied, measuring audience response, optimizing the rollout.
This is the beauty of Ellison’s strategy. He doesn’t need to own every station directly. He just needs to control the infrastructure they can’t function without. When the pressure comes, the stations that depend on Oracle’s cloud systems know exactly which side their bread is buttered on.
Even the paperwork shows the pattern. When the FCC approved Paramount in July, it forced in “viewpoint diversity” mandates and promises to “strengthen local news.” Nexstar’s Tegna filing uses nearly identical phrasing: “preserve high-quality journalism,” “ensure a diversity of opinion.” Same buzzwords. Same regulator. Same season. That’s not boilerplate. That’s a playbook.
And just weeks later, multiple outlets reported that the Ellisons are weighing an all-cash bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. That’s CNN, Warner Bros. films, HBO, and DC Comics. Paramount was the test run. Nexstar is the megaphone. Warner Bros. Discovery would be the crown jewel.
…but TV is only half the story. Paramount and Nexstar show how Ellison bends old media through lawsuits, regulators, and affiliates. The next frontier is the feed itself—TikTok. And to understand how that piece locks in, you also need to understand David Ellison, the perfect proxy who keeps his father’s fingerprints light.
That’s Part 4B: the TikTok of it all, the David Ellison of it all, and how those last two loops close the circle.
Resources & Links
Government Docs
Reporting on the Paramount Deal
FCC, Trump, and CBS Fallout
Local News & Affiliate Power
