There is so much sheer corruption on all sides in the efforts by Larry Ellison and his son, David, to cash in big by trading favors with the Trump administration (and incidentally killing CBS News as part of the deal) that it’s hard to keep all the details straight. Happily (or sadly), a brilliant new documentary, Murdering 60 Minutes, connects all the dots.
The documentary follows the format of a 60 Minutes investigation. It is like 60 Minutes investigating itself. You need to see it. And you can, free, on the website of the producers, Brave New Films.
The documentary is partly narrated by Scott Pelley, one of the longtime 60 Minutes correspondents who was fired in June by the new head of CBS News, Trump ally Bari Weiss, whom the CBS parent corporation Paramount Skydance installed as part of its alliance with President Trump.
David and Larry Ellison own 47.2 percent of total shares (23.6 percent each) in Paramount Skydance, and hold 77.5 percent of the voting power. David Ellison is the company’s chairman and CEO.
Here are the key points of the story, as explained in the documentary.
It begins with Trump suing CBS for $20 billion on October 31, 2024, because he didn’t like the way an interview with Kamala Harris was edited. But as the documentary explains, there was zero chance that Trump would have won the suit. CBS was totally protected by the First Amendment.
At the time, the Ellisons, through their production company, Skydance, were looking to acquire the owner of CBS, Paramount, in an $8 billion deal. That deal needed the blessing of the FCC. So with Trump now back in the White House, on July 2, 2025, Paramount agreed to “settle” the lawsuit for a $16 million bribe paid personally to Trump.
The $110 billion Paramount–Warner Bros. merger would combine two of America’s biggest media companies into one behemoth.
On July 24, 2025, the FCC duly approved the Skydance acquisition of Paramount. The owner of Paramount, Shari Redstone, and her family personally pocketed $1.75 billion on the deal. The merger closed two weeks later.
Then in October 2025, David Ellison paid Weiss an astonishing $150 million for her small media company, The Free Press, and installed her as head of CBS News, where she commenced a series of purges. But the story doesn’t end there.
Not content with the Paramount Skydance deal, the Ellisons sought to acquire Warner Bros. as well. The $110 billion merger would combine two of America’s biggest media companies into one behemoth combining film, television, sports, entertainment, and news. According to the documentary, Larry Ellison personally told Trump that acquiring Warner Bros. would allow Paramount to overhaul CNN, which has been relatively independent and critical of Trump.
But what Ellison does with CNN, while it may be distressing to the concept of a free press independent of the state, isn’t an antitrust issue. This is: The combined company would own Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures and DC Studios, CBS, HBO Max, MTV, VH1, BET, Comedy Central, Showtime, Paramount Network, Nickelodeon, Paramount Plus, Pluto TV, Discovery, TLC, HGTV, Food Network, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, TNT, TBS, Turner Classic Movies, Investigation Discovery, and Animal Planet.
Trump antitrust authorities nevertheless waved the merger through in June, asserting that the deal is unlikely to harm market competition or consumers. The Justice Department’s Antitrust Division cleared the transaction without demanding any asset divestitures or behavioral changes.
The following month, a coalition of 12 state attorneys general led by California AG Rob Bonta objected and sued to block it. As the Prospect has reported, the lawsuit focuses on the power a combined Paramount and Warner Bros. would have to impose worse terms on theaters and cable companies in distribution deals. (Some theater chains then supported the deal, but only after Paramount made financial promises to them, Bonta claimed last week.)
On July 20, U.S. District Court Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín issued a temporary restraining order against the merger, and scheduled a trial for next March. Since then, Ellison and his allies have pushed their contacts in the media and political worlds to (a) claim that the AGs are merely playing politics, and (b) argue that a settlement is critical for jobs in California and the future of American entertainment. The expected next governor Xavier Becerra and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass backed a settlement.
Last week, Bonta canceled planned settlement meetings with Paramount, accusing the company of acting in bad faith and leaking confidential discussions to the press. As Bonta reiterated last week, the future of CNN has nothing to do with his complaint; it’s a simple case about market power and leverage.
A “ticking fee” in the deal pays Warner Bros. shareholders 25 cents per quarter for every day the deal is delayed past September 30, 2026, which translates to about $7 million daily. This is chump change for the Ellisons, but if the deal ultimately falls apart the Ellisons are on the hook for a total of $11.4 billion, which includes a $7 billion termination fee to Warner Bros. and $2.8 billion previously paid to Netflix, plus what could be $1.6 billion in ticking fees until the expected end of the trial in June.
In one more corrupt deal with the Ellison family, on his first full day back in office Trump unveiled Stargate, a $500 billion AI venture with Oracle as a founding partner—and Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chairman and owner of 41 percent of company stock, standing beside him at the White House. Oracle’s expanding AI business soon added nearly $100 billion to Ellison’s fortune in a single day.
But Oracle badly overexpanded its AI operations, just in time for the backlash. Oracle debt has been downgraded to BBB-, one level above junk bond status; its stock is down about 40 percent this year, cutting Ellison’s net worth almost in half, to around $200 billion.
Assuming that the Paramount–Warner Bros. deal is blocked, these serial losses would be poetic justice and a telling lesson in the perils of oligarchic hubris and the limits of alliance with Trump. But they would not save CBS.
The CBS News franchise dates back 99 years, to September 18, 1927, and to the heroic days of Edward R. Murrow broadcasting live from London during the Blitz. And 60 Minutes has been running continuously since September 1968. Over more than half a century, 60 Minutes broke one great story after another, and CBS News survived the growth of cable, the internet, and the fragmentation of the three networks. It took the Ellisons and Bari Weiss less than a year to destroy it.
In principle, the First Amendment and freedom of the press endure. But as the press critic A.J. Liebling memorably put it, freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one. When vital news organizations, whether The Washington Post or CBS News, are owned by oligarchs who have other business deals with a corrupt president, the press is not free.
