With $80 billion in debt and a sprawling media empire to combine, David Ellison will have his hands full with the now court-approved combination of Paramount and Warner Bros Discovery, known as Skydance.
But so-called “expert” opinion has him failing before he even starts.
His quest to create an artistically and financially successful company is doomed because, well, they say so.
Ellison may even be selling pieces of it pretty soon when he wakes and realizes he won’t be able to make the numbers work, their reasoning goes.
Yet if history, including the history of this deal, is any guide, the experts you see quoted and opining about the supposedly insurmountable challenges of Ellison & Co. aren’t worth that proverbial bucket of spit.
Follow their leads at your own expense.
I say this not as a hater of the experts that have tracked this saga, which began when the indie producer running the small-ish Skydance studio made his first move trying to buy the iconic yet fading media conglomerate Paramount from the Redstone family.
Rather, this column is meant to serve as a cautionary tale, a commentary on how elite opinion forms a narrative even when that narrative begins to unravel.
That unraveling began almost immediately, when the so-called smart guys doubted his ability to convince the initially reluctant Redstones to sell him Paramount.
Intense battle
It continued when he faced an intense battle over WBD with streaming giant Netflix.
Then after persuading the initially reluctant David Zaslav to sell him Warner Bros. Discovery, no one in this chattering class really expected him to convince the hyperpolitical California AG Rob Bonta to quickly drop his antitrust suit with few conditions so Ellison could consummate the deal and move on with the media merger of the century.
Even worse, with every victory the opinion makers seemed to double down on their misread that David Ellison was a lucky-sperm kid movie producer of middling success.
Sure, he had big dreams of creating a media behemoth — but only with the big bank account of his father, the billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, mainstream reasoning went.
David didn’t deserve to be anywhere near iconic properties like the Warner Studio or CNN, according to the experts.
The fact that his dad is pals with President Trump and he went out and hired the brilliant and heterodox journalist Bari Weiss to run CBS only seemed to confirm their confirmation bias.
We all make mistakes, which is why I’m not naming names, though it’s not hard to find out who these people are.
They hail from Wall Street, academia or the media.
They may sound like they know what they’re talking about with their snappy dial-a-quotes and first-class academic pedigrees.
Sounding good may get you that linchpin quote in the Times or some clicks on your quick takes — but not much else.
You might be saying, so what?
It’s just a media issue.
True, but there’s also a bigger problem here about how false narratives are shaped by biases, most of them political and elitist that go beyond this one merger.
If you’re keeping score, it hasn’t been a good few years for expert opinion makers.
Recall that their solutions to COVID, including harsh lockdowns, turned out to be spectacularly bad.
Meanwhile, the investing public relies on real-time, and above all, evenhanded digestion of facts.
This deal was heavily wagered on arb-trading desks across Wall Street or on various prediction market platforms.
People at the companies themselves needed the unbiased scoop to figure out whom they would be working for in the coming years, or if they would be working at all.
Blind spots
As it turns out, they would have been better off consulting an Ouija board than following the chattering class.
Are the smart guys behind their Ivy League degrees and polished personas just plain dumb?
No, but they have their blind spots — much of it caused by ideological biases — which were at the heart of our nation’s COVID reaction and many more stories in recent years.
Those biases were front and center in the miscalculations surrounding what went down with Ellison and WBD.
As much as elite opinion makers (and I would include my media brethren) tout their egalitarianism, they are an insular bunch (same prep schools, same colleges, same dinner parties and the rest).
They’re also a sneering bunch when it comes to outsiders and those who veer off the progressive plantation.
David Ellison, with his indie film background and family ties to Trump, represented the ultimate target to sneer at.
A more self-aware “expert” would know that he’s got good genes from his father, one of the smartest men in Silicon Valley with a decades-long track record.
David must have learned something from pops.
Do a little research on him and you’ll find that David Ellison is no lucky-sperm kid.
He’s had commercial success in producing movies (“Mission Impossible,” “Top Gun”) that people actually watch.
Also, when David began proving the elite consensus wrong, the bias didn’t correct.
Consider the most recent elite consensus that Bonta would never ever settle his fallacious antitrust lawsuit to stop the deal, even when Ellison threatened to leave town and take all his jobs with him.
It was an idle threat, we were led to believe, until Bonta folded like a cheap suit when he realized the elites miscalculated Ellison’s determination.
Not all elite opinions are wrong, of course.
But if you’re going to trust, also verify.
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