Trump Said Larry Ellison Promised to Make CBS News More Conservative as Condition of Media Deals Requiring Administration Approval

Details

On December 24, 2025, The New York Times reported that President Trump has privately told people that Larry Ellison—the Oracle co-founder and one of the world's richest people—assured him he would turn CBS News into a more conservative outlet. The claim surfaced as the Ellison family pursues media acquisitions collectively worth more than $100 billion, all of which require Trump administration regulatory approval.

The report raises questions about whether the president is using his administration's regulatory authority over media mergers to extract editorial concessions from prospective owners of major news organizations.

The Regulatory Leverage

The Ellison family's media ambitions are entirely dependent on approvals from agencies under Trump's control. Skydance Media's $8 billion acquisition of Paramount Global—giving the family control of CBS, Nickelodeon, MTV, and Paramount Pictures—required FCC approval, which it received in July 2025. The family is now pursuing an approximately $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which would add CNN, HBO, and dozens of additional networks. That deal requires both DOJ antitrust review and additional regulatory clearances.

Trump has been unusually explicit about his involvement. He told CNBC he would be "involved" in any decision about whether to approve a WBD deal—an extraordinary public statement about what is normally a matter for independent regulators. He also stated publicly in December 2025 that it was "imperative that CNN be sold," inserting himself directly into the competitive bidding process.

According to the Times, Larry Ellison has taken the lead in making the case to Trump for why Paramount—rather than Netflix—should win control of Warner Bros. Discovery. David Ellison has described Trump as a believer "in competition" and argued Paramount's combination with WBD would be "a real competitor to Netflix, a real competitor to Amazon," while the administration viewed the Netflix bid with heavy skepticism.

Pattern of Editorial Changes at CBS

Since the Ellison family gained control of Paramount in August 2025, a series of editorial decisions at CBS have tracked with the kind of conservative shift Trump claims he was promised.

The $16 Million Lawsuit Settlement (July 2025): Before the merger closed, Paramount paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit Trump filed against CBS over 60 Minutes' editing of a Kamala Harris interview. Legal experts widely described the lawsuit as meritless. The settlement funds were directed to Trump's future presidential library. The FCC approved the Skydance-Paramount merger weeks later. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr denied the matters were connected.

Senator Elizabeth Warren characterized the sequence: "Sure looks like they paid Donald Trump $36 million for this merger." Senators Warren, Sanders, and Wyden sent a letter to David Ellison raising concerns that anti-bribery laws may have been violated. Representatives Raskin and Pallone demanded internal communications related to the merger, settlement, and editorial changes.

Cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (July 2025): Three days after Colbert called the settlement a "big fat bribe" on air, CBS announced the cancellation of The Late Show, despite Colbert leading broadcast late-night ratings with approximately 2.4 million viewers per episode. CBS maintained the decision was "purely financial." Trump had previously called Colbert "a complete and total loser" on Truth Social and suggested CBS was wasting money on him.

Installation of Bari Weiss (October 2025): David Ellison hired Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News after Paramount acquired her digital outlet, The Free Press, for a reported $150 million. Weiss, who reports directly to David Ellison rather than through CBS News's normal editorial chain, had no prior television experience. Over the summer, David Ellison had made promises to FCC regulators that CBS would become "more hospitable to conservatives."

Spiking of 60 Minutes CECOT Segment (December 2025): On December 21, Weiss pulled a 60 Minutes segment about Venezuelan men deported to El Salvador's CECOT prison—36 hours before air, after the story had been fully fact-checked, legally vetted, and publicly promoted. Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi wrote in an internal memo that the decision amounted to corporate censorship, warning that allowing the administration's refusal to comment to block stories would hand them a "kill switch" for inconvenient reporting.

The spiking came days after Trump publicly complained that 60 Minutes was treating him "far worse" under the new ownership—and while Paramount was simultaneously pursuing the Warner Bros. Discovery deal that required Trump's regulatory blessing. The segment eventually aired on January 19, 2026, with added segments addressing Weiss's concerns.

Senator Ed Markey stated: "This is what government censorship looks like: Trump approved the Paramount-Skydance merger. A few months later, CBS's new editor in chief kills a deeply reported story critical of Trump."

Trump's Relationship with the Ellisons

Larry Ellison, once a Clinton-era Democrat, has steadily moved closer to Trump. He hosted a six-figure-per-person Trump fundraiser in 2020. Court records show he participated in a November 2020 call with Trump allies focused on strategies to contest the election results. He appeared alongside Trump at the White House in January 2025 to announce the $500 billion "Stargate" AI partnership involving Oracle, and has been described as a regular White House visitor since.

According to the Times, Larry Ellison has at times been frustrated by Trump's trade policies, but in recent conversations with the president he has been "obsequious." The Times reported that both Ellisons are close to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and that Larry Ellison's support for Israel has been a factor in his gravitation toward Trump.

Trump's posture toward the Ellisons has been transactional. He has praised them when it suits him—saying in October, "they're friends of mine... they'll do the right thing"—but has also publicly attacked CBS when coverage displeases him. "If they are friends, I'd hate to see my enemies!" Trump posted after a 60 Minutes segment he disliked.

The April 2026 Dinner Honoring Trump

On April 23, 2026, David Ellison hosted a private, invitation-only dinner in Washington described in invitations as "honoring the Trump White House," according to The New York Times. The event was held at the U.S. Institute of Peace, a federally chartered institution that the State Department had renamed "The Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace" in December 2025 after the administration took over the building. The dinner took place two days before the White House Correspondents' Association dinner—and hours after Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders approved the $111 billion merger at a special meeting held the same day.

What drew the most scrutiny was the guest list. According to reporting by Michael M. Grynbaum of the Times, among those seated with Trump was Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general—the official who oversees the Justice Department whose antitrust division was at that moment reviewing the Warner Bros. acquisition. Also at Trump's table was Paramount chief legal officer Makan Delrahim, who led that same antitrust division during Trump's first term before Ellison recruited him in October 2025 to run the lobbying campaign for the deal's approval. Bari Weiss joined Ellison at Trump's table as well, with former Evening News anchor Norah O'Donnell, CBS News president Tom Cibrowski, and several White House correspondents also in attendance. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller were present, and Trump spoke to guests for nearly an hour.

The arrangement placed the prosecutor reviewing the merger, the corporate lawyer lobbying for it, and the president who had publicly inserted himself into it at the same table—at an event thrown by the buyer, in a building bearing the president's name. The Times reported consternation within the CBS newsroom over the dinner's potential to create a perception of coziness between the news division and the administration; several journalists said they were surprised by it. Outside the venue, several dozen protesters gathered on the National Mall, some chanting "Block the merger." Representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, joined the rally and called the event an "oligarch's dinner."

DOJ Clears the Merger Over Staff Objections

On June 12, 2026, the Justice Department's Antitrust Division cleared the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger without requiring any divestitures or behavioral conditions, stating the transaction was "not likely to result in harm to competition or American consumers" across streaming, linear television, and theatrical film. Antitrust experts noted the government extracted no concessions.

Days later, The Wall Street Journal reported that senior DOJ leadership had closed the eight-month investigation before the career lawyers who handled it could finish their work. Those staff investigators had been leaning toward recommending a lawsuit, on the grounds that combining two major movie studios would be anticompetitive and violate antitrust law, and were surprised to learn the deal had been waved through. The Journal reported that the career staffers "didn't participate in writing" the clearance statement—and that some suspected it was crafted less to settle the antitrust question than to raise the legal bar for any state attorney general who might mount a challenge. Senior officials reportedly concluded that Ellison had addressed their concerns during a roughly two-hour interview the prior month.

The sequence echoed the March 2026 statement by the acting head of the antitrust division, Omeed Assefi, who had said the deal would "absolutely not" be fast-tracked for political reasons given the Ellison family's ties to Trump. Senator Elizabeth Warren called the clearance "terrible news for every American who doesn't want Trump-aligned billionaires to control what they watch and how much they pay," adding that the process "reeks of corruption." Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward pushed back on the leak, writing that no staff lawyer had raised the concern through their chain of command.

What Happens if the WBD Deal Closes

If the Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition is completed, the Ellison family would control both CBS News and CNN—two of the three major television news operations in the country—along with two major film studios, two streaming platforms, and dozens of cable networks. This would represent an unprecedented concentration of news media under a single family with documented close ties to the sitting president.

CNN employees told NBC News they were "shaken" by the prospect. One on-air journalist said: "No one wants to work for the Ellisons. And if Bari is going to be running CNN, expect people to leave."

Federal clearance has not ended the fight. A coalition of nearly a dozen state attorneys general led by California's Rob Bonta and New York is preparing a lawsuit to block the merger on antitrust grounds, and Bonta has maintained the deal "is not a done deal." State enforcers have recently demonstrated they can act independently of federal regulators—Bonta won an injunction halting the Nexstar-Tegna station merger after federal agencies approved it, and a state coalition prevailed against Ticketmaster after the DOJ settled. The deal also faces active reviews from the European Commission—which is scrutinizing roughly $24 billion in financing from the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi under the EU's Foreign Subsidies Regulation, with a provisional mid-July deadline—and the U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority, which must decide by August 7 whether to escalate to an in-depth Phase 2 investigation. Paramount has said it expects to close the deal by September 30, 2026, and has pledged a multimillion-dollar-per-day "ticking fee" to shareholders if it slips past that date. Senator Elizabeth Warren has called the acquisition "an antitrust disaster."

Broader Pattern

The CBS situation fits a wider pattern during the Trump administration of media companies making accommodations that coincide with regulatory needs. Disney's ABC paid $15 million to settle a Trump defamation suit. Meta donated $1 million to Trump's inaugural fund and made platform changes. In each case, the companies had business before the federal government. The Ellison case is distinct in that Trump himself has reportedly claimed credit for the editorial direction of a news organization whose corporate parent depends on his administration's approval to complete its deals.

How Trump himself views this courtship—and how far it extends beyond the Ellisons—came into sharper focus in June 2026. A WIRED report by Hugo Lowell on June 18, 2026, drawing on Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan's book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump (Simon & Schuster, June 2026), described Trump showing associates—including Elon Musk—fawning private text messages he had received from Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon's Jeff Bezos, telling people the two men were "kissing my ass." Musk's reported reaction to the messages: "First-class groveling." Trump reportedly marveled at the reversal: "Think of where these guys were in 2016. They hated me. They were doing everything they could to knock me down."

The book's details, per the WIRED report, illustrate the transactional texture of the relationships. Around a Thanksgiving 2024 visit to Mar-a-Lago, Zuckerberg sent Trump a photo of a letter from one of his children expressing hope for "the golden age of america." Bezos—whose Washington Post had been a frequent Trump target—disparaged the paper to Trump, calling it a poor investment. And months after a private dinner, Bezos asked Trump to limit SpaceX's dominance of government space contracts, suggesting that deputy defense secretary Steve Feinberg promote "contractor diversity" and warning that reliance on a single launch provider posed national security risks—an argument that would have benefited his own rocket company, Blue Origin. The gambit failed: Trump ultimately reconciled with Musk and favored SpaceX, expanding its access to U.S. launch sites and Starship operations.

The episode reinforces the dynamic at the center of this entry: billionaire owners of companies heavily regulated by—or seeking contracts from—the federal government privately currying the president's favor while pursuing decisions worth billions, with the president openly treating that deference as tribute. The Ellison case remains the starkest example, because it involves the editorial direction of major news organizations rather than platform policies or launch contracts.