Zionist Billionaire David Ellison is quickly emerging as one of Hollywood’s biggest power players, and his empire-building may just be starting.
Ellison is the son of tech oligarch Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle and the second-richest man in the world. But David is not just an heir (although his inheritance is quite sizable, estimated as nearly $5 billion in Oracle stock in 2015, and the company’s shares have only risen since then). Ellison was a USC film student who dropped out in his senior year to partly finance and star in his first production, 2006’s Flyboys. The movie was a dud, but Ellison’s career took on a brighter shine with his production company, Skydance, behind hits like Mission Impossible and Star Trek. But Ellison wants to be more than another Hollywood producer and, akin to his father, a mogul.
Earlier this year, with financing help from his father, David took hold of Paramount Pictures, one of Hollywood’s most legendary studios. Ownership of Paramount has given the father and son control of a vast media conglomerate. Beyond the production studio and its expansive content library—including Titanic, one of the highest-grossing films ever made—Paramount now owns a trove of cable channels, such as MTV, Comedy Central, and Showtime; the 4th-most-watched streaming platform, Paramount+; and, crucially, the broadcaster CBS and its venerable news division, home to the most-watched news program, 60 Minutes.
Ellison has wasted little time in putting a Zionist stamp on his newly acquired assets. Back in September, when thousands of artists signed onto a pledge organized by Film Workers for Palestine to no longer work with Israeli state-funded media institutions, Paramount issued a statement condemning the artists and misrepresenting the action as an attack on Israelis as people.
Paramount’s move provoked an internal backlash amongst employees at the studio, reportedly spanning every division of the company. Issuing their criticism anonymously for fear of retaliation, employees said Paramount’s statement opposing the pro-Palestine action betrayed the liberal and inclusive values it claims to stand for.
Moreover, employees noted that Paramount has recently backed several Israeli-focused productions, including a miniseries in partnership with the Jewish National Fund, the quasi-state agency with a long and ongoing history of promoting and facilitating the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and then greenwashing that expulsion by seeding forests over razed villages.
In contrast, Paramount has no Palestinian stories in the pipeline, and employees encouraged the leadership to promote Palestinian productions as well, such as by becoming the U.S. distributor of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, which, despite its acclaim, has found no Hollywood backers. Paramount did not respond to their own employees’ concerns.
Word is getting out about Paramount’s alliance with Israel, if one can judge by the fact that its X account was recently hacked.
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