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Donald Trump said Larry and David Ellison are giving him millions in free ads as part of their recently finalized deal to acquire Paramount.
Is that true?
We still don’t know — in part because David Ellison, who is now Paramount’s CEO, has refused to directly address the question.
But a new report in The New York Times says an Ellison lawyer has previously denied that there’s a side deal.
In July, after Fox News reported that Skydance — the Ellison-owned studio that wanted to buy Paramount — would provide millions to Trump via “advertisements, public service announcements, or other similar transmissions,” an attorney for Skydance privately called the story “unmitigated false bullshit,” per the Times.
The Times also reports that a Trump rep continues to insist that “there was an unwritten understanding between the president and the owners of Skydance.”
A Paramount rep declined to comment. I’ve also asked the White House for comment. Prior to the Ellisons’ purchase of the company, Paramount executives had said they had “no knowledge of any promises or commitments made to President Trump other than those set forth in the settlement ” that they agreed to.
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That’s a lot of back-and-forth that ultimately doesn’t clear anything up.
We do know that Shari Redstone, Paramount’s previous owner, gave Trump $16 million to settle a suit we can kindly describe as a legal long shot, where he accused Paramount’s “60 Minutes” of interfering in the 2024 election because of the way it edited an interview with Kamala Harris.
We also know that days after that payment, the Federal Communications Commission, headed by Trump appointee Brendan Carr, signed off on Skydance’s acquisition of Paramount.
Beyond that, for now, we have only Trump’s claim that he “anticipate[s] receiving $20 Million Dollars more from the new Owners, in Advertising, PSAs, or similar Programming.”
As I’ve noted before, it’s understandable that David Ellison doesn’t want to address the he-said — or no-one-said — issue here: If Trump is wrong and Ellison contradicts him, he’ll anger a President who routinely inserts himself into ostensibly privately run businesses. If Trump is right and Ellison says so, he’ll have all kinds of other trouble.
This shouldn’t be fuzzy. Either one of the richest families in the world promised to give the president of the United States millions of dollars in free ads, so they could get the go-ahead to buy a major American media company — or they didn’t. We shouldn’t be left guessing.
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