He sat With Donald Trump at the Kennedy Center, he attended a UFC fight on the White Lawn that his company streamed, he hosted a springtime dinner in the president’s honor and he even dined at a state dinner hosted by Trump for Chinese President Xi Jinping, which CNN stopped by. But David Ellison says he is not unusually close with Trump nor playing politics last year as he sought to get the Warner Bros. deal approved.
“We have a good relationship with this administration. We also have a good relationship with the Biden administration,” the Skydance chief told reporters Tuesday afternoon. He also cited a “good relationship with Gov. Gavin Newsom.”
“It’s important to talk to everyone on both sides of the aisle,” he said. “We don’t want to be politicized.”
The mogul was responding to a question at a press event on the Paramount lot — the day his deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery officially closed — about whether he believed he had been unhealthily close with the Trump administration. Ellison cited the presence of other entertainment figures like Ari Emmanuel and various tech executives at the UFC bout, though of course he himself has come under criticism for his cozying up to the president. Meanwhile, Trump described Ellison and the larger Skydance team as “fantastic people” in Washington on Tuesday, according to a White House pool report. Earlier in the day, at a town hall on the Warner lot, Ellison also saluted Makan Delrahim, the former assistant attorney general at the Justice Department in Trump Eye. Delrahim helped guide Skydance through the regulatory process on the WBD acquisition.
Historically, media executives, at least in the C-suite, have tried to maintain good relations with both parties, given how quickly the winds can change in Washington. But that has been difficult as both left-wing advocates have called on officials to take a stance, while Trump, FCC Chairman Brandon Carr and others associated with the administration have singled out entertainment leaders they do not approve of.
While there is deep concern in press circles about what impact Trump might have on CNN’s scale once Ellison takes over, the mogul said nothing about his track record should give people pause.
“We haven’t talked to any political party about the news, though it depends on how the word “we” is defined,” Ellison said — a parent. report Last November it was said that Ellison’s father Larry, a key bankroller of the WBD deal, had discussed with Trump the possibility of firing a pair of CNN hosts. David Ellison said Tuesday that any talks with politicians are only about “how we want to be in the truth business and the trust business.”
The younger Ellison also said that his trips to D.C. were about working toward a federal film tax credit and cited his relationship with South Carolina Senator Tim Scott (R), who is pushing the idea, though Ellison’s role in the ongoing effort is debatable, given how much of the credit Hollywood ambassador Jon Voight has received, including from the White House.
However, political gossip was never far from Ellison’s mind. In a comment that seemed to be aimed at former Paramount controlling shareholder Shari Redstone as well as a group of Warner Bros. executives dating back to the AT&T days, he said of today’s acquisition, “Let’s just set the table for a second and zoom out on how we got here, OK. With all the respect in the world to everyone who was already at these companies, how did we get to a place where Paramount could have been acquired and Warner The brothers could have been acquired had the business not been disrupted a decade ago they allowed Amazon Prime Video to come in and disrupt their business. They didn’t change and they held on to the past for a very long time, and you know if you don’t disrupt their business, someone else will.
He added, “I think if you’re intellectually honest, you need to zoom out and look at how the symptoms persist over a longer period of time.”