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Image: Oracle
If there’s one thing President Donald Trump cannot do, it’s keep a secret. Alongside saying that negotiations between the U.S. and China held in Madrid on September 14 and 15 had gone well, Trump decided to tease a cliffhanger that would keep everyone coming back to his Truth Social profile. “A deal was also reached on a ‘certain’ company that young people in our Country very much wanted to save,” he wrote. “They will be very happy.”
That “certain” company is TikTok, and the smart betting is that the deal that placates both the U.S. and China could involve Oracle, the company cofounded by Larry Ellison, which this month shot up in value, making the 81-year-old the world’s richest man for a short period. Oracle was a preferred buyer in Trump’s eyes earlier this year, when TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, denied planning to sell the app to Oracle. Despite that, Trump said that an offer from Oracle was “still on the table.” (Neither Oracle nor TikTok responded to Fast Company’s request for comment.)
Any inkling of Ellison within the TikTok deal would be yet another major media move for the magnate, who, with his son, David, recently pulled off an $8 billion merger with Paramount, putting him in ownership of the likes of MTV, Nickelodeon, and CBS News. That latter media property is a concern for some: The newly christened Paramount Skydance is reportedly in negotiations with Bari Weiss, founder of The Free Press, to become either editor-in-chief or co-president of CBS News.
Weiss’s reporting for The Free Press has taken ideological slants that would be unusual for CBS News, which attempts to maintain an impartial, objective stance in its reporting.
The Ellisons—father and son—are now rumoured to be looking to broker an even bigger deal. Paramount Skydance is said to be looking to buy Warner Bros. Discovery in a deal that would be worth more than $70 billion.
“Paramount and Warner Bros. would in essence become the biggest studio in the world with a formidable base of franchises that include DC Comics, Harry Potter, Mattel licenses like Barbie, Hasbro licenses like Transformers, Mission Impossible, Star Trek, Top Gun, Dora, SpongeBob, etc.,” wrote Barclays analyst Kannan Venkateshwar in a report last week. Alongside all those household names, there’s another journalistic outlet that would come under Ellison ownership: CNN, up to now one of the biggest thorns in Trump’s side.
If the Warner Bros. Discovery deal were to go through, Ellison would control streaming services with a combined 200 million-plus subscribers, says Barclays (though there will be overlap between the Paramount+, HBO Max, and Pluto services). It’s something Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren warned against on X on September 11. The deal with Warner Bros. Discovery, she wrote, “must be blocked as a dangerous concentration of power.” Add TikTok’s 170 million-plus users and one of the hottest properties in the social space, and you get to a position of dominance in the media. (Warren’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
“It is not a sign of a healthy democracy when billionaires are buying up all of the means of cultural consumption,” says Steven Buckley, lecturer in media and digital sociology at City St George’s, University of London. Others have pointed out that the potential playbook, if this were to go ahead, draws comparisons with Elon Musk’s takeover of a social platform to dominate public discourse. Musk has previously taken credit for helping Trump secure the White House in 2024 through his positioning of X as a supportive social network.
“It is naive to think that over time [Ellison’s] business and political philosophy, combined with the external political pressures from this and future administrations, wouldn’t have an impact on how the American public experiences TikTok,” Buckley says.
Of course, many critics would argue that any deal is based on a false premise that TikTok needs to be American-owned outright—an issue that has literally been litigated as far back as the dying days of Trump’s first presidency.
“Fundamentally, TikTok is not broke, but Ellison and the Trump administration are trying to ‘fix’ it nonetheless,” Buckley says. “Any actual problems with the platform, such as misinformation, harassment, etc. are not going to be fixed simply by a change of ownership. And user privacy is certainly not at the front of this administration’s mind.”
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Drew Anthony Smith plays with pictures for Fast Company online.