Wired

09/24/2025

In an age where human attention is perhaps the world’s most valuable commodity, the Ellisons could be in charge of almost everything a modern-day pseudo robber baron could want by the end of this year or soon after. I spoke with sources who have dealt with Ellison—as well as others who know his son, David—to get a sense of how he operates. And he operates a lot lately; the Trump administration has essentially sent a fair amount of business his way after Ellison established himself as a reliable, if sparing, GOP donor and fundraiser over the 2020 and 2024 cycles.

There’s his pending dominance over vertical video with a key role in the proposed new ownership consortium for the US version of TikTok, for which Oracle’s servers already provide hosting. There’s airwave domination, with a news and entertainment behemoth under his son’s control following the merger of David’s Skydance and Paramount—which might possibly include the keys to not only CBS but also CNN, if Skydance actually puts in a bid and succeeds in a potential acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The empire spans from the sweaty floor of the octagon after acquiring US broadcast rights to the Ultimate Fighting Championship (also under Paramount) all the way to the clay soil of Abilene, Texas, home of OpenAI’s Stargate data center project led by Oracle and Softbank. Oracle is also linked to a $100 billion deal with Nvidia and OpenAI announced Monday.

The Ellison family is cornering the market on attention and data the way the Vanderbilts did railroads and the Rockefellers did oil.

Despite all of that, many of the president’s advisers and senior aides know little to nothing about the man atop it all.

“I’ve never really heard anyone talk about him, tbh,” one of Trump’s advisers tells me in a text message. “Not someone who really comes up all that much.”

With a still vaguely described domestic iteration of TikTok and scores of TV channels from news to entertainment coming into the family’s portfolio, it remains to be seen whether David Ellison will become a Murdoch-type figure, setting the agenda for the modern GOP and in control of properties occupying the top spot in the conservative media ecosystem in the way Fox News did for the past three decades.

But with the widely rumored acquisition of the right-leaning media startup Free Press and reported interest in tapping cofounder Bari Weiss to run CBS News—and even, potentially down the line, a merger with CNN—he’s already begun making Murdoch-type moves. (Weiss did not respond to a request for comment.)