David Ellison's Hollywood empire: from failed actor to Paramount owner eyeing Warner Bros.

Summary

David Ellison, 43, is CEO of Skydance and is attempting to become one of Hollywood's largest studio moguls. The path began with a $60 million film that nearly killed him.

In 2006, Ellison's father Larry, then worth $18 billion, funded a World War I aviation movie called Flyboys to support his college-aged son's nascent production company. David took an acting role in the film alongside James Franco. The movie bombed at the box office. The critical humiliation triggered an atrial fibrillation episode so severe that David was hospitalized and required his heart to be shocked back into rhythm. Larry, despite losing millions, called the hospital to tell his son he was still proud of him.

Ellison abandoned acting and spent the next decade building Skydance into a blockbuster financier, backing hits like Top Gun: Maverick and the Mission Impossible franchise. In 2009, as he was signing a co-financing deal with Paramount, he declared to colleagues: "We are going to buy Paramount one day."

Last year, Larry stepped in again, putting up roughly $6 billion to help David acquire Paramount outright, a studio worth over 10 times the size of Skydance. The acquisition was made possible partly by the scale of Larry's wealth accumulation. In 2006, Paramount was valued at $22 billion while Larry was worth $18 billion. By 2025, a $6 billion investment barely dented Larry's fortune, which briefly peaked near $400 billion after Oracle's AI-driven stock surge in September. In one day in September, Larry's net worth increased by $89 billion—enough to buy 15 Paramounts—after Oracle reported potential windfall revenue from providing compute power to OpenAI and other AI companies.

Now Ellison has set his sights higher. This past fall, he and his father launched a hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN and HBO Max alongside its film and television studio. The Warner board rejected the offer in favor of a deal with Netflix, but the Ellisons are continuing to push their bid and attempt to persuade Warner shareholders. The battle is expected to extend well into 2026.

If successful, David would control two of Hollywood's largest studios plus their affiliated cable networks, CNN and CBS, creating a conglomerate that industry observers compare to the Murdoch empire.

Family Origins

Larry Ellison was adopted at nine months old and told repeatedly by his adopted father that he would never amount to anything. That dynamic drove Larry to build Oracle. He later said he had "all the disadvantages necessary for success." Larry was largely absent from David's childhood. He divorced David's mother shortly after David's third birthday while his second wife was pregnant with David's sister. When Larry told his first wife's therapist "I don't understand love. I don't understand people bonding to one another," it signaled a man uncomfortable with family life.

The two grew close only when David became a teenager and they began taking flying lessons together, eventually staging mock dogfights over the Pacific. David became an aerobatic competitor, developing a signature move called "the Devilator."

After high school in 2001, David enrolled at Pepperdine as a business major but transferred to film school at USC. For his senior thesis, he wrote, directed, and starred in a thriller about a billionaire son rescuing his diabetic girlfriend from kidnappers. His girlfriend at the time was diabetic. The budget was close to $100,000, and he shot part of it in one of his father's homes. After graduating, he chose to leave USC entirely to film Flyboys.

His subsequent acting roles were forgettable. He appeared as a bumbling assistant in a TNT show, a shirtless drug addict in a TV movie, and a golf apparel company owner in the 2009 comedy Hole in One. Taylor Lautner dropped out of a film called Northern Lights after discovering David had written a role for himself.

From Actor to Operator

When acting didn't work out, a person who knew David said: "He was like, if I'm not gonna be on screen, I'm gonna be the biggest guy in the room."

Larry's friend David Geffen introduced David to Skip Brittenham, a legendary Hollywood lawyer who had represented Pixar. Brittenham helped David write a business plan for Skydance and taught him to navigate Hollywood's web of agencies, producers, and studios. David's thesis was explicit: Skydance would make movies with explosions, no rom-coms, no Oscar bait.

Raising money from outside investors was difficult. Nobody wanted to back a 25-year-old failed actor. In 2010, Larry made the point moot by providing almost all of the $150 million David was trying to raise. The timing was fortuitous. The 2008 financial crisis had crippled Paramount, and Deutsche Bank pulled out of a funding agreement. David negotiated a co-financing deal with Paramount in exchange for a slice of its biggest franchises.

One lesson David internalized came from a conversation with David Geffen about the 2002 film Minority Report. At the premiere, Geffen explained that while everyone else—Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise, the studio system—got paid, DreamWorks, which produced the film, made "a relative pittance." It was a lesson in the confusing deal economics of Hollywood, where even a hit could generate nothing for the company that produced it.

David proved a savvy operator, renewing his Paramount deal on better terms and managing the full spectrum of studio work: talent egos, debt facilities with JPMorgan, the mechanics of turning blockbusters into profit.

Character and Ambition

Current and former colleagues describe a paradox. One person called him "smart" and "reasonably shrewd," but not the ruthless killer that his mentors—Steve Jobs, David Geffen, Larry—embodied. "He's something else entirely," the person said. A former Skydance employee who worked closely with David offered a more pointed assessment: those mentors are "ruthless killers, single-minded people with a different DNA."

During the Warner Bros. auction, the company assigned code names to each bidder. Netflix was "Noble." Comcast was "Charm." Paramount was given the name "Prince."

What drives David's ambition is partly rooted in spectacle and intimacy. He has often described Terminator 2: Judgment Day as formative, a film about the fate of humanity that, to him, was really about a father figure protecting a child who never knew his father. At age eight, watching Arnold Schwarzenegger sacrifice himself in molten steel, David cried.

That is the family story David is living. A father who didn't understand love built an empire to prove himself to a man who told him he was worthless. Now that father is backing his son's bid to become one of the most powerful men in entertainment. Whether David can hold and grow that empire, whether he has the ruthlessness his mentors possessed, remains unclear as the Warner Bros. battle extends into 2026.