The businessman Elon Musk, owner and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has made a capital injection of 100 billion dollars (about 89 billion euros) into Skydance, the new media and entertainment group born from the integration of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros Discovery.
This influx of funds from Musk is part of a broader fundraising round being carried out by Skydance, according to the American network CNBC, which cites a source familiar with the process.
Skydance began operations just two weeks ago, after Paramount expedited the procedures to close the transaction on October 6. The resulting company is led by David Ellison, until now CEO of Paramount, with Ynon Kreiz as co-CEO.
The connection between the Ellisons and Musk goes back a long way. David's father, Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle and its CEO until 2014, allocated around 1 billion dollars (about 890 million euros) to support the purchase that the South African-born businessman made of the social network Twitter, now X, in 2022. In addition, Larry Ellison became part of Tesla's board of directors.
Paramount Skydance announced on October 6 the completion of the purchase of Warner Bros Discovery, thus completing the operation agreed upon in February for nearly 110 billion dollars (98.143 billion euros), after winning the bidding against Netflix, which ultimately chose to withdraw its acquisition proposal for the entertainment company, which will be renamed Skydance.
Within this operation, closed once all regulatory approvals foreseen in the merger agreement were obtained and the usual closing conditions were met, Skydance's class B shares began trading this Tuesday on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) with the new ticker 'SKYD', after moving its listing from Nasdaq, where it traded under the symbol 'PSKY'. For its part, the shares of Warner Bros Discovery ('WBD') ceased trading this Tuesday on Nasdaq.
The Ellison family controls the majority of Skydance's capital, while the Ellison family itself and RedBird Capital Partners are, jointly, the only owners of the class A common shares of Paramount, which includes 100% of the voting shares of the combined company.
The new merged group integrates two of the most relevant film studios in the sector, two international streaming platforms, a powerful catalog of television channels, including CBS, HBO, and the cable networks of Paramount and WBD, as well as the news networks CBS News and CNN. In addition, there is a prominent offering of live sports, which includes CBS Sports and TNT Sports, along with a large archive of content and an extensive portfolio of brands and franchises.