Topline

David Ellison’s nepo-baby start helped launch him out of the shadow of his world’s second-richest-person father to become one of Hollywood’s biggest players after Paramount’s merger with his own Skydance.

Ellison’s father Larry Ellison, 80, is a titan of Silicon Valley who co-founded Oracle in 1977. David Ellison grew up in Woodside, California, in the Bay Area, where he was raised by his mother. His sister Megan, 39, is a film producer who founded Annapurna Pictures and backed the Oscar-nominated films “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Her,” “American Hustle” and “Phantom Thread.” His mother raised him to love movies, and the family would gather in their living room and watch the same films over and over: “all three ‘Star Wars’ movies, back to back, ‘Jurassic Park,’ the original ‘Terminator,’ ‘Back to the Future,’” journalist and novelist Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote in a GQ profile.

In 2011, Ellison married actress and singer-songwriter Sandra Lynn Modic, with whom he has two children. She releases country music under the name Sandra Lynn and has released multiple EPs, including “Sandra Lynn” in 2014 and “Fight” in 2018. Her most popular music video, for her song “Lose the War,” has garnered 1.1 million views on YouTube. Billboard premiered the video for her song, “I Think of You,” in 2019, describing Lynn’s song as a “stirring” and “vulnerable” ballad. She has not released music since 2019, according to her Spotify and YouTube profiles.

Ellison briefly worked as an actor during the 2000s, with his first starring role in the 2006 war drama “Flyboys” alongside James Franco. “Flyboys,” bombed at the box office, grossing less than $18 million against its $60 million budget—which was reportedly financed by Ellison and his father. He then starred in the 2010 comedy “Hole in One” alongside “American Pie” actor Steve Talley, which largely flew under the radar.

Backed by his father’s money, Ellison founded Skydance in 2006 and told Kara Swisher in The New York Times in 2022 that Steve Jobs, who was one of his father’s best friends, was an important mentor to him. He said Jobs initially told him it wouldn’t work. “I want you to come back up here and talk about how you guys are going to aspire to make movies and tell stories better than anybody else, because that’s what we did at Pixar,” he says Jobs told him. In 2009, Ellison raised $350 million, some from his father, to finance a five-year agreement with Paramount to co-produce movies. Brodesser-Akner described him in GQ as someone who “bought his way into Hollywood because he was rich and stayed there because he was good.” He notched his first big hit with The Coen brothers’ Oscar-nominated “True Grit,” the second movie produced under Skydance, which grossed more than $250 million worldwide on a $38 million budget. But he then began producing big-budget movies and veered toward well-known franchises. His third movie with Skydance was “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” which grossed nearly $700 million on a $145 million budget and was the first of five “Mission Impossible” movies Skydance backed. Collectively, Skydance’s “Mission Impossible” movies grossed more than $3.3 billion worldwide. Skydance produced two Oscar-nominated “Star Trek” movies—“Star Trek Into Darkness” (2013), which grossed $467 million on a $185 million budget, and “Star Trek Beyond” (2016), which made $343 million on a $185 million budget—and backed two Terminator movies, the financially successful “Terminator Genisys” in 2015 and the box-office bomb “Terminator: Dark Fate” in 2019, which reportedly lost Paramount and Skydance more than $120 million. “Top Gun: Maverick” is the studio’s biggest hit and the 14th-highest-grossing movie of all time. Skydance’s merger agreement with Paramount valued Skydance at $4.75 billion.

In 2024, Ellison donated nearly $1 million to former President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign, before he dropped out of the race. But since negotiating the Paramount-Skydance merger, Ellison was spotted sitting near Trump at a UFC event earlier this year, and Trump has praised Ellison’s takeover of Paramount. “Ellison’s great, he’ll do a great job with it,” Trump told reporters in June. Ellison’s Skydance has promised the Trump administration it would gut diversity, equity and inclusion policies and install an ombudsman to field complaints of ideological bias in CBS news coverage, in apparent attempts to appeal to Trump’s FCC to secure approval for the merger. Ellison’s father, Larry Ellison, is a longtime Republican donor and supporter of Trump. In 2020, Larry Ellison told Forbes he had never donated to Trump but once let him use a property he owned for a fundraiser. “I don’t think he’s the devil—I support him and want him to do well,” Larry Ellison told Forbes. Larry Ellison joined Trump at the White House in January alongside other tech CEOs to discuss investment in artificial intelligence.

Ellison has said he wants to transform Paramount into a “tech hybrid” company, using artificial intelligence to “turbocharge content creation capabilities” and cut costs. Ellison said in a presentation to investors last year he envisions building a “studio in the cloud” in partnership with Oracle to streamline production processes, using AI and cloud computing to speed up film production and animation. He also said he wanted to improve streaming service Paramount+’s algorithms to reduce cancelations and increase the amount of time subscribers use the platform. Ellison also reportedly told federal regulators he would push CBS News to embrace “unbiased” and “American storytelling,” following Trump’s “60 Minutes” lawsuit and Paramount settlement. Ellison has reportedly held talks with Bari Weiss, the self-described “left-leaning centrist” and often divisive journalist, to acquire her media company The Free Press, and potentially fuse it in some with CBS News. Ellison’s possible embrace of Weiss comes as Skydance’s general counsel Kyoko McKinnon promised the FCC in a letter the new Paramount leadership will “ensure that the company's array of news and entertainment programming embodies a diversity of viewpoints across the political and ideological spectrum.” Weiss, a critic of diversity, equity and inclusion and “woke” culture, started The Free Press after quitting the Times over what she called its “illiberal environment” and its “new McCarthyism.”

Ben Affleck praised Ellison at a CNBC panel last year, stating he is “not management class” and will approach Paramount “in a very different way as somebody who’s invested as an owner.” Billionaire filmmaker Tyler Perry, who has signed development deals with Paramount-owned BET, referred to Ellison by saying it would be beneficial to have “someone who loves this business at the helm of one of the most storied studios.” Jane Fonda, who starred in the Skydance-produced Netflix series “Grace & Frankie,” said the merger “ensures that I get to continue the collaboration with an incredibly talented and enthusiastic film family.” Ellison told CNBC his frequent collaborator Tom Cruise is “supportive” of the merger.

The FCC commissioners voted 2-1 on Thursday to approve the Paramount-Skydance merger. The lone dissenting vote was from Anna Gomez, the only Democrat on the commission, who accused Paramount of “cowardly capitulation to this Administration,” referencing the president’s lawsuit settlement. Trump has claimed he received $16 million as part of the Paramount settlement and would be entitled to “$20 Million Dollars more from the new Owners, in Advertising, PSAs, or similar Programming.” After approving the merger, FCC Chair Brendan Carr said he welcomes “Skydance’s commitment to make significant changes at the once storied CBS broadcast network,” stating “Americans no longer trust the legacy national news media to report fully, accurately, and fairly. It is time for a change.”

FCC Greenlights $8 Billion Paramount-Skydance Merger After Skydance Vows To End DEI Programs (Forbes)

How Will David Ellison Tackle the Big Problems at Paramount? (New York Times)