Elon Musk Reportedly Puts $1 Billion Into Ellison's Skydance
Elon Musk has invested $1 billion in Skydance, the company run by David Ellison, according to a Semafor report published on October 22. Paramount has declined to comment on the reported investment.
Skydance is the company behind the recent Paramount takeover. Its buyout, a deal paid for largely with borrowed money, helped create a combined company called Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery. That $100 billion deal closed on October 6, and Deadline reports that the combined company now carries nearly $90 billion in debt.
The idea of a Musk stake is not new. In September, Semafor reported that Paramount had weighed asking Musk for an equity investment. Equity means a share of ownership, rather than a loan. Musk owns the rocket company SpaceX and the social network X, and he has been tied to the Ellison family before. Larry Ellison, David's father and a co-founder of the software company Oracle, invested $1 billion in Musk's 2022 deal to take Twitter, now X, private. He also invested in Tesla in 2018 and sat on its board for a time.
Larry Ellison has also put his own weight behind the Paramount deal. Deadline reports that he personally guaranteed more than $40 billion of equity financing for Paramount's purchase of Warner Bros. A personal guarantee means he promised to cover that sum if the money was not found elsewhere. Paramount's own filings show that Warner Bros.' advisers had asked the Ellison family to back $40.4 billion of equity on December 1, 2025.
Other investors are part of the picture too. Deadline reports that a group of three Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, led by Saudi Arabia, agreed to invest in the deal. Sovereign wealth funds are investment funds owned by national governments. Together, they will hold just under 50 percent of the combined company's equity. Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, sits on Skydance's newly formed board and is among the investors Skydance has approached.
John Malone, a veteran figure in the cable television business, made a bolder prediction at a New York conference. He said Musk would provide about $10 billion to support Skydance. He also predicted a global output deal between Skydance and SpaceX, which would mean SpaceX buying programmes from Skydance, along with a SpaceX investment in Skydance. These were predictions, not announced agreements, and no such deal has been confirmed.
For viewers, the immediate effect is hard to see. Shows and films are still made and scheduled by the studios and streaming services, not by the people who own them. The numbers show the scale of the money now resting on the company, and how many investors are lining up behind it.
