Elon Musk is set to invest $1 billion in David Ellison’s Skydance, according to a Semafor report published on Thursday and the figure may be only an opening bid. On Wednesday, Liberty Media’s John Malone told a Paley Center summit that a larger deal was coming, built around SpaceX and the Ellisons, with Musk’s total buy-in running between $8 billion and $10 billion.
Malone said he believed a deal was coming there and that he would not doubt for a minute that before very long an announcement would be made.
Much of the attention has fallen on why the Ellisons need the cash. David and his father Larry, who bankrolled much of the Warner Bros. acquisition, are carrying $79 billion in debt and job cuts alone cannot close that gap. An injection of up to $10 billion, even if not all of it is in cash, eases the pressure from their bankers. The $1 billion already helps.
The larger consequence is what the money would buy Musk: a way into the media and entertainment business. A stake in Paramount-Warner Bros., which at a $10 billion valuation could reach as much as 15%, would give him a seat at the table on the company’s biggest decisions. A board seat would depend on how many voting shares he secured but the cheque alone opens a line to David Ellison. Musk already has one through Larry, the close associate who helped fund the Twitter purchase.
It would also hand Musk a content pipeline for X, something he has coveted. He has tried this before, with original shows from Don Lemon, Tulsi Gabbard and Jim Rome through a Range Media Partners deal, plus a plan for WWE mini-episodes. Access to Skydance content would go much further. Episodes of Yellowstone, The Last of Us, NCIS and Game of Thrones, along with live sport on Turner and CBS, could all end up on X behind a paid or other tier. X would also gain from Skydance’s ad-sales team.
The investment would come through SpaceX, which already houses X, xAI and Starlink and Musk has revived talk of merging Tesla into it. He holds about 85% of the voting shares in SpaceX. Starlink already serves around five million Americans and many more people abroad and SpaceX has spent the past week buying spectrum in a bid to compete directly with AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. Last year it signed $19 billion worth of deals with Dish owner Charlie Ergen that included spectrum licences.
