It’s official: Skydance Media’s deal to purchase CBS parent company Paramount Global for $8 billion is complete, and incoming chairman / CEO David Ellison’s first order of business is a massive restructuring.
In an open letter about his plans for Paramount, a Skydance Corporation (the merged companies’ new name), Ellison announced that, going forward, the business will be split into three distinct units: studios, direct-to-consumer, and TV media. Ellison explained that the restructuring is meant to boost efficiency as the new company prepares to transition its entire enterprise to a single technology platform for the first time.
“In doing so, we will be able to reduce our technology spend while driving substantial efficiency and performance gains and enabling leaders across the company to make faster and better decisions,” Ellison said. “That investment, combined with other initiatives to achieve efficiencies in costs associated with labor, real estate, procurement, and workflow gives us even greater confidence in our ability to not only achieve—but meaningfully exceed—the $2 billion in real efficiencies we previously announced.”
Ellison, son of Oracle co-founder and executive chairman Larry Ellison, also stressed that he sees Paramount, a Skydance Corporation, as a “tech-forward company” that will be taking more cues from Silicon Valley. Ellison listed AI-assisted translation, virtual sound stages, and proprietary ad-tech stacks as some of the things he wants to see more widely implemented. And beginning next year, the company plans to move Paramount Plus and Pluto TV onto “a unified technology stack” to boost performance and cut operational costs.
“This integration will elevate the consumer experience across our services—enhancing our recommendation engine, accelerating delivery speed and quality, while also giving us the opportunity to position Pluto TV as the ‘top of the funnel’ to attract new customers to Paramount Plus,” Ellison said.
As Variety notes, closing the new deal cleared the way for Larry Ellison, Skydance, and RedBird Capital to buy out all of Paramount chairwoman Shari Redstone’s shares in National Amusements Inc. (NAI), which was the controlling shareholder of Paramount Global. Redstone will not be a part of the new Paramount’s board of directors, and NAI shareholders are reported to have received a collective $1.75 billion in cash because of the deal.
The new company’s launch comes just weeks after the FCC’s approval of the merger, which hinged on Skydance and Paramount’s willingness to capitulate to the Trump administration’s push to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in corporate America. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said at the time that Skydance had “made written commitments to ensure that the new company’s programming embodies a diversity of viewpoints from across the political and ideological spectrum.” Skydance also agreed to “adopt measures that can root out the bias that has undermined trust in the national news media,” which is why there will now be an ombudsman tasked with bringing complaints about “bias or other concerns” to the president of CBS News.
It was clear that the FCC would not sign off on the Paramount / Skydance merger until Paramount agreed to pay $16 million to settle Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the company over claims that CBS News edited a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris in a way that misled voters during the 2024 elections. Trump’s lawsuit was “so ill grounded that it comes close to being sanctionable as frivolous,” according to one legal expert, but had Paramount stood its ground, it could have jeopardized Skydance’s chances of securing a deal.
There’s also widespread belief that Paramount’s payout to Trump contributed to the “financial” reasoning behind CBS’ decision to cancel The Late Show With Stephen Colbert last month. But now that all the dust has settled, we can all step back and plainly see what these deals were for: to get some shareholders paid.
