In August 2025, David Ellison’s Skydance Media, backed by the vast fortune of his father Larry Ellison (founder of Oracle Corporation), completed its acquisition of Paramount Global. This wasn’t simply a business transaction — it was the beginning of an unprecedented consolidation of American media power. The deal brought CBS, Paramount Pictures, MTV, Nickelodeon, and numerous other properties under the control of one of America’s wealthiest families.
But the Ellisons aren’t stopping there. Reports indicate they’re preparing a bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, which would add HBO, CNN, Warner Bros. studios, and DC Entertainment to their portfolio. Perhaps most significantly, Larry Ellison has been named by former President Donald Trump as a key figure in negotiations to acquire TikTok’s U.S. operations — potentially giving the family control over the platform that shapes political consciousness for an entire generation of young Americans.
If these acquisitions succeed, the Ellison family would control: traditional broadcast networks, cable news, major film studios, streaming platforms, and one of the world’s most influential social media algorithms. This represents a concentration of narrative power unseen in the modern era. The Billionaire Anxiety: American Decline and the Scramble for Control
To understand why this is happening now, we must examine the psychological and material conditions of America’s billionaire class in 2025. They are watching their world crumble — not in the sense of losing their wealth (though that’s a fear), but in the sense of losing the stable imperial order that generated and protected that wealth.
American global hegemony is weakening. The dollar’s dominance is being challenged. Infrastructure crumbles while China builds.
The social contract that kept the American working class pacified for decades — the promise that hard work leads to prosperity — has been thoroughly exposed as a lie. Millennials and Gen Z are the first generations in American history expected to be poorer than their parents. They cannot afford homes, healthcare, or education. They are drowning in debt for degrees that lead to gig economy jobs.
This creates a legitimacy crisis. When people can no longer believe in the system, they start looking for alternatives. They start asking dangerous questions: Why do we have billionaires while children go hungry? Why do we have empty houses and homeless people? Why are we funding wars abroad while our communities collapse? The Billionaire Response: Control the Narrative
The billionaire class has concluded that the way forward isn’t to address these material conditions — that would require them to give up power and wealth. Instead, the strategy is to control the story being told about those conditions.
This is where “equitable distribution” rhetoric becomes useful. The messaging will be about “giving everyone a voice,” “platform neutrality,” “balanced coverage,” and “algorithmic fairness.” TikTok, in particular, will likely be framed as being “saved” from Chinese control and “protected” for American users. The Paramount-Warner merger will be sold as “creating jobs” and “competing with Netflix.”
But behind this progressive-sounding language lies a darker strategy: use narrative control to manage decline, deflect blame, and prevent class consciousness from forming.
What makes this different from traditional media ownership is the integration of algorithmic control with broadcast media. Previous generations of media moguls — the Hearsts, the Murdochs — controlled what stories were told. The Ellisons will control both the stories and the system that determines who sees them, when, and in what context.
Modern propaganda doesn’t work like Soviet-era information control. It doesn’t censor everything and force everyone to repeat the same slogans. Instead, it:
Floods the zone: Overwhelm people with content so they can’t distinguish signal from noise
Amplifies division: Promote contentious cultural issues that split the working class along identity lines
Manufactures complexity: Make every issue seem so complicated that ordinary people feel unqualified to have opinions
Offers false choices: Present two establishment positions as the full spectrum of acceptable debate
Algorithmic nudging: Subtly guide people toward certain conclusions while maintaining the illusion of choice
When you own TikTok’s algorithm plus CBS News plus CNN, you control the conversation at every level. You decide what “goes viral.” You decide which “experts” get platformed. You decide what questions journalists ask and which stories get follow-up coverage.
The genius of this system is that it can claim neutrality while systematically excluding certain perspectives.
Both “liberal” and “conservative” voices will be present — but both will operate within acceptable parameters. The debate will be about whether billionaires should pay 35% or 40% in taxes, not whether billionaires should exist. It will be about which countries deserve military intervention, not whether the U.S. should have a global military empire. Turning Americans Against Each Other
Perhaps the most insidious aspect of consolidated media control is its ability to redirect legitimate grievances toward false enemies. Americans are angry — they should be angry. The system has failed them. But who gets blamed?
I hate that there is no where you can say the things that should be said about such people.
laughing my ass off to that photo
How on earth is this is not an obvious anti-trust violation? Where is European regulatory overreach when you need it! Too busy putting backdoors into Signal…
rules do not apply to rich people. we have seen this outcome too many times in the past couple of years and just… did nothing about it
CBS News, CNN and TikTok USA don’t have much market share in the EU, I guess 🤔.
Saying this shit like rupert murdoch doesn’t exist
Murdoch is garbage but his garbage is confined to his networks which are targeted at conservatives. Paramount/CBS, TT, and Warner, owners of CNN, is a huge chunk of media, specifically TT where a majority of people are seeing stuff that the rest of the media ignores is targeted at everyone
They almost had the bravery of saying Zionist Supremacist motives. They did mention palestinian/gaza message control but the angle is stil billionare oligarchy alone. From Christofascist/MAGA gaslighting of the right for Zionist supremacism or DNC/Chuck Schumer gaslighting of the left for Zionist supremacism, every oligarch who gets on board gets rewarded. Ellison supports Zionism, and media control is to strengthen Zionist control. OP dancing around this doesn’t help, and in fact distracts from actual motives.
You didn’t know that billionaires create nutjob kids that lack all empathy? Like Elon Musk, the openly nazi billionaire child.
That’s the story of all kings for thousands of years. That’s why we got rid of them. We killed the kings, and their children.
Did we, if kings still exist under a different name?
I think the biggest issue isn’t even present in the article, and it’s a question of epistemology: How do we even know anything?
Like, all the news articles could be fake. It could all be one complex, intricate matrix-like simulation/environment that encompasses us, creates the illusion of a “normal” life that we supposedly have, all the while controlling exactly what the newspapers report about and what we hear about the outside world.
I have in fact suspected that something like this is already happening for many decades now; It just seems utterly unlikely to me that big media companies, which have always been owned, or at least influenced by the ruling class and the rich, are completely neutral in their data and would only want what’s best for the individual person reading it. It’s much more likely that they serve a narrative that’s good for the ruling class, but not necessarily for the people.
And in fact, Trump makes this obvious. He’s not shy of spitting blatant fake news on “fox news”. It’s literally made-up facts, and for the common people there’s no way at all to know what of the “news” is true or wrong anymore. That, in fact, makes newspapers meaningless. You literally learn nothing through them if you cannot know what’s true and what’s false. In fact, it’s surprising to me that it took till today that people start seeing this problem as a very big one.
I tend to believe that the only thing that you can actually know about the real, physical world are those things that happen sufficiently close to where you live. You can just walk there and talk to the people involved in the stories yourself; no need to trust abstract newspapers from thousands of miles away.
This requires localism: That everything you care about happens locally, i.e. in a distance that you can physically reach as a person. This means that people wouldn’t pay taxes that go to schools at the other side of the country, thousands of miles away, or decide policies that affect people thousands of miles away. In the US, that would mean making no common law for all of the federation, but making it only for the local community.
It means regions with a diameter of no more than 50 miles would have to understand themselves again as independent entities that have their own laws, economy, and people. Like it used to be during the medieval age, largely.
The article is very well written overall.
Manufactures complexity: Make every issue seem so complicated that ordinary people feel unqualified to have opinions
I mean, this has been happening since i can remember. Whenever interesting questions come up, people say it should be “left to the experts”. People feel as if they can’t really talk about anything that matters because they wouldn’t understand it anyways. It’s bike-shedding: Focusing on unimportant details until there’s no more time to actually discuss the relevant matters. My mother did this throughout my whole life; I cannot remember her ever talking about meaningful things. It was all a constant stream of distractions.
Cool, deleting both apps
I deleted TikTok a few days ago and I had lots of videos there. Lots of fond memories and even met some people on the platform and found my barber on that app. But it’s going to be another Instagram because the content curators all think the same and promote the same ideology and try to incite people over the same false narratives.
This is going to be like when Fox bought MySpace.
Larry is such an odd alias for Satan to assume whilst walking the Earth.
Don’t blame Satan for God’s mistakes.
How much more do these insufferable pigs need?
I think individualized algorithmic feeds were the worst thing to happen for democracy. It allowed companies to control what people see in their feed and information is power, people are so fractured these days because everyone is seeing different things every time they open these apps, and what they see is intentionally made to be as sticky as possible to keep people hooked to the platform doom scrolling, it doesn’t matter that if they had a positive or negative reaction to the posts in their feed, so long as they stay engaged allowing the company to mine and sell their data and giving the company power to shape the narrative on individual basis.
…to understand how this happened, you will need to go back to the FABULOUS raygun years, i think 1983 and 1987 are of particular interest the media landscape, but it was all planned by folks from the nixon administration to begin the hollowing out of media independence through unified ownership, but whatever…
No worries guys, decades of studies have proven consistently that television doesn’t affect anyone’s opinion very much.
I mean - ha! - you’d have to be a grade A moron to think all of those studies were fundamentally flawed.
They have Tiktok in the East too.
