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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.
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. |
