Elon Musk’s Stake in Skydance Could Transform Media As We Know It

On Thursday came word that Elon would make a (start with?) $1 billion investment in the David Ellison company, according to a Semafor report. This comes after comments Wednesday from John Malone, who suggested (tipped?) that Musk was about to put even more money in via a SpaceX-centric deal with the Ellisons. “I think there’s a deal coming there,” the Liberty Media kingpin told a Paley Center summit earlier this week. “I would not doubt for a minute that before very long you’re going to see an announcement.” Malone was short on specifics but long on dollar amounts: Musk’s buy-in would run between $8-$10 billion. The $1 billion could be just a start. It’s already a significant one.

A lot of the focus here has been on the Ellisons’ need for the money. David and his father Larry, who bankrolled much of the Warner Bros. acquisition, are in the hole for $79 billion, and you can only cut that much staff to make up the difference. A cool $10 bil from Elon, even if not all of it is in cash, takes the bankers’ pressure off you. A cool $1b already helps.

But the Ellisons’ financial breathing room (we should all feel such asphyxia) comes in a distant second, consequence-wise, to what such an investment would create: a backdoor for Musk to enter the media-entertainment world.

Owning a piece of Paramount-Warner Bros. (depending on the valuation the $10b could net as much as 15%), would give him a place at the table on the company’s biggest decisions. Even if it doesn’t come with a board seat (that depends on how many voting shares he’d get) it would certainly buy a channel into David Ellison. (Musk already has this via Larry, a close business associate who bankrolled the Twitter buy, but writing an eleven-figure check has a funny way of prying open the canal further.) And it would give Musk a content pipeline at X, a badly coveted resource. The mogul has tried to make such a push before, with original shows from Don Lemon, Tulsi Gabbard and Jim Rome as part of a Range Media Partners deal, and a plan for WWE mini-episodes.

But this changes the game for X and Musk much more dramatically. Access to Skydance content makes him more than just a dilettante in the content world — it makes him a streamer.

Episodes of Yellowstone, The Last of Us, NCIS, Game of Thrones — never mind plenty of live sports on Turner and CBS — now all potentially on X, on a paid or other kind of tier. And X strengthened by Skydance’s ad-sales team, providing an even further boost.

So, yeah, if you were worried what it meant that Ellison was combining two legacy studios into one, imagine when 15 percent of the resultant company is owned by the world’s richest man. Who also is the biggest Republican donor by a wide margin. Who The Wall Street Journal says ordered Starshield slowed down, marooning Ukraine. As the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion once said, now I got worry.

And there’s another domino to fall: Starlink. The company that already provides Internet service to about five million Americans and many more people overseas could get a lot bigger and more central to our communication. SpaceX has been buying up spectrum in the past week in a bid to compete directly with the major mobile carriers AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. This has been a major project for SpaceX. Last year it inked $19 billion worth of deals with Dish TV owner Charlie Ergen that included spectrum licenses. So snapping up one of those telcom companies wouldn’t be out of the question either.

If Musk had a minority stake in two of the biggest studios and was also one of the biggest Internet providers, he would achieve the kind of pipes-content verticality that no company has ever held in American media and communication, let alone a single person at the head of that company. (Musk holds about 85 percent of the voting shares in SpaceX.) Controlling a stake in HBO and CNN along with the way we watch it — what could go wrong?

Plenty, of course, starting with the fact that some of the most well-platformed Musk critics, from John Oliver to Jake Tapper would now be under the thumb of Musk. And he seems like a guy who takes criticism well. And continuing with the fact that those personalities and others at the old WBD are also among the biggest critics of MAGA and the Republicans — ie, the people Musk is currently shelling out nearly $300 million to keep in power.

Oh, and did I mention that HBO next year is slated to air Alex Gibney’s Musk takedown? I’m sure that’s something he’s eager to put on the air.

Gibney’s film etches a picture of an Elon intent on taking over the world. Now, with the final credits barely up, Musk is acting out exactly that blueprint. For a guy who thinks he’s been the victim of a hit piece, he’s sure doing a lot to make Gibney look like a prophet.

There are only two things that could reasonably stop this rolling snowball of influence. The first is regulators. Except…

Oh, and Trump aside, the FCC is chaired by Brendan Carr, one of the biggest Musk fanboys around. Asking him to stop Musk is like asking Kevin Feige to promote Superman.

Hope would lie with a change at the White House in 2028 — there was already plenty of regulatory heat on Musk under Joe Biden, one reason Musk went all in on Trump in the first place. Of course two years is an eternity in mogul-time, and even if the Democrats retake the White House in 2028, Musk may simply be too strong to regulate.

The second hope lies with Wall Street. Musk’s money and influence are pretty much all conferred on him by investors; if the Tesla and SpaceX stock prices drop far enough, his buying (and borrowing) power suddenly shrink. But I wouldn’t hold my breath. Investors love when Musk expands and wheels and deals — see how the SpaceX stock jumped by double digits Wednesday in part due to the Tesla merger buzz. The Skydance and Starlink investments will only send valuations further into outerspace.

In Gibney’s film, Musk’s father Errol says with a knowing chuckle that anyone underestimating his soon learns their lesson — he always, always wins, always gets what he wants.

The media was fooled once on Twitter — no way he would buy it, we all said back in 2022 — then quickly found ourselves without a place to park such trenchant commentary. Getting fooled twice would just be shameful.