David Ellisons Skydance deal was approved but it may not be smooth sailing

With $80 billion in debt and a sprawl­ing media empire to combine, David Ellison will have his hands full with the now court-approved combination of Paramount and Warner Bros Discovery, known as Skydance.But so-called “expert” opinion has him failing before he even starts.His quest to create an artistically and financially successful company is doomed because, well, they say so.

Ellison may even be selling pieces of it pretty soon when he wakes and realizes he won’t be able to make the numbers work, their ­reasoning goes.Yet if history, including the history of this deal, is any guide, the experts you see quoted and opining about the supposedly insurmountable challenges of Ellison & Co.aren’t worth that proverbial bucket of spit.Follow their leads at your own expense.I say this not as a hater of the experts that have tracked this saga, which began when the indie producer running the small-ish Skydance studio made his first move trying to buy the iconic yet fading media conglomerate Paramount from the Redstone family.

Rather, this column is meant to serve as a cautionary tale, a commentary on how elite opinion forms a narrative even when that narrative begins to unravel.That unraveling began almost immediately, when the so-called smart guys doubted his ability to convince the initially reluctant Redstones to sell him Paramount.It continued when he faced an intense battle over WBD with streaming giant Netflix.Then after persuading the initially reluctant David Zaslav to sell him Warner Bros.

Discovery, no one in this chattering class really expected him to convince the hyper­political California AG Rob Bonta to quickly drop his antitrust suit with few conditions so Ellison could consummate the deal and move on with the media merger of the century.Even worse, with every victory the opinion makers seemed to double down on their misread that David Ellison was a lucky-sperm kid movie producer of middling success.Sure, he had big dreams of creating a med...