Gerry Cardinale, Paramount board member, investor and key architect of its pending merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, says the notion that CEO David Ellison is tight with Donald Trump has been “way overstated.”
“Forget about where you are on the political spectrum,” Cardinale said at the Bloomberg Screentime conference in L.A. on Thursday. “You have an administration that’s pro-business. Anybody in corporate America should have a relationship with that administration. And that’s not because it’s Trump. Trump is pro-business, he’s very interested in the technology community. So having that relationship does not mean in any way that there’s this coziness.”
Skydance’s pursuit of Paramount got complicated by a lawsuit Trump filed against Paramount-owned CBS News, but regulators approved it promptly approved it after the suit was settled for $16 million despite the dubious merits of the case. Then, during the chase for Warner Bros. Discovery, which Paramount expected to formally acquire next week after a year-long quest, Ellison and Paramount had numerous points of intersection with the Trump administration.
Ellison and others visited Trump’s compound in Mar-a-Lago, courted him in Washington and hosted events for him, including around the White House Correspondents Association ceremony. In operating Paramount, Ellison acquired The Free Press and installed its founder and editorial leader, Bari Weiss, as editor-in-chief of CBS News. The news division and shows like 60 Minutes have made a number of changes to its programming that are widely perceived to be overtures to the administration.
And then there is the UFC, which has a multi-billion-dollar rights deal with Paramount. Trump has attended UFC events, including one spectacle last summer held at the White House. Bloomberg editor Lucas Shaw, who was interviewing Cardinale, nodded to the spectacle, which streamed live on Paramount+. “There’s a difference between having a relationship and staging a fight on the White House lawn,” he said.
Cardinale replied by naming senior leaders of TKO Group, parent company of the UFC, including Nick Khan and Ari Emanuel. “They were in the front row next to Trump, Is Trump too cozy with them? Is Ari too cozy with Trump?” Shaw mentioned that Emanuel used to have Trump as a WME client.
“The inference on ‘cozy’ here is just not appropriate,” Cardinale said. “There’s nothing to it. I’m telling you. I’ve been with David, by his side every step of the way. There’s nothing to it. It makes for great headlines and clickbait. There’s nothing to it. Absolutely not.”
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