David Ellison Wins. It Doesn’t Yet Make Him a Winner.

Sometimes a song captures a mood better than any prose. 

When David Ellison was revealed as the winner in the two-man bid to be the last king of Hollywood, or at least a key part of its hopefully ongoing legacy, a line came to mind: the title lyric from Fleet Foxes’ 2020 indie-rock power ballad “Can I Believe You?”

Ellison, after all, had staked his whole bid — not just of Warner Bros., but his entry into moguldom — on a passionate but unverified claim. He was the best person to steward Hollywood from its uncertain present to a bright future. He loved movies, he had money he could afford to lose and, maybe most important, he had a vision for how to preserve its soul underneath a suit of tech armor.

But all of that don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, to cite one of the more famous movies of the studio Ellison has just acquired. The vision wasn’t proven, the money has a way of drying up with nervous stock markets and even more queasy fathers and, if we’re being accurate, a lot of people love movies.

Of course in one sense you’d have little reason not to believe Ellison. He had defied odds at every turn. The latest example of that came Thursday afternoon, when, as many headline writers noted, the 43-year-old had achieved a “stunning” win in pulling Warner Bros. out from under the legs of Netflix and its Hollywood leader Ted Sarandos. The streamer has had a deal in place for nearly three months, through every Ellison shareholder agitation or Kennedy Center habitation. At times Ellison on conference calls and C-suite letters seemed so desperate you almost started to feel bad for him — well, inasmuch as you could feel bad for someone who was given an airplane for their 13th birthday.

And yet here he was standing with the big prize — a movie studio and collection of pay-TV and other assets with a market cap of $71 billion. Of course, he just paid $111 billion plus an extra few billion in sweeteners, which might dampen the winning feeling, like buying $30 of tickets at the state fair ring-toss to win a stuffed animal that costs three bucks. But a prize nonetheless.

And he had done it just the year before too, moving from a secondary position as a financier into the owner’s chair at Paramount — Shari Redstone’s go-to savior. And yet again a bunch of years before that, when he had gone from financing some pretty marginal movies to mega-hits like Star Trek Into Darkness and eventually Top Gun: Maverick. And really he had done it years before that in moving from acting to financing films in the first place.

Nepo babies tend to get little credit, and for good reason. David Ellison leveled up on almost every stage of the game because of money. And when your family’s net worth fluctuates between $225 billion and $390 billion (I’d take those fluctuations!) you don’t really have to worry about money. You just make other people worry whether they have enough of it. Ellison kept offering more and more for WB, and as much as the win was stunning, it also would have been stunning — or at least stunningly stupid — if Netflix stuck with it. The company’s initial bid was $82 billion without the cable networks, which seemed profligate enough, and how much do you keep going. And so Ellison’s money (and the money of Saudi, Qatar and Abu Dhabi) won out.

But Ellison had yet another advantage besides cash. He wrestled on each of these gameplay screens with an opponent who was deeply troubled, at a time that was deeply desperate. Ellison began financing his first tentpole films in the late 2000’s and early 2010’s, when a financial-crisis-shaken Hollywood was desperate for any kind of stable money. He came in to Paramount franchises like Star Trek and Top Gun when the company was feeling the pinch from its declining cable business; similarly, he came in a few years later to scoop up the company (for a suddenly pittance-seeming $8 billion) from a Shari Redstone who had nowhere else to go.

And he now defeated Ted Sarandos, who was Public Enemy No. 1 in both Washington’s GOP circles, as that cringily grandstanding Congressional hearing about Netflix’s trans content demonstrated, and in Hollywood, as every commissary lunch with every agent and executive worried about the death of the theatrical model could tell you.

Even one of Ellison’s biggest advantages — the favor of the Trump administration to bless these deals — came not because of savvy maneuvering on his part but because his father already laid the groundwork by chumming up to the president, even joining that now-infamous call about contesting the 2020 election results. All David had to do was sit with Trump at some events and maybe rattle 60 Minutes’ cage every once in a while and he was golden.

These are all advantages you can’t blame Ellison for having — would any of us in our heart of hearts not also enthusiastically spend $111 billion granted to us or not thank the heavens that our dad was friends with the man in charge? But a lack of culpability is not the same as an excess of capability; the fact that it’s justifiable that Ellison walked through doors open for him far from foretells an ability to jimmy them unlocked. What will the Paramount slate look like with the Warner Bros studio at its disposal? How will he handle an HBO still in many ways living in another era of spend big on development and hope it all comes out in the Emmys wash? 

How can he manage a CNN whose only feature more notable than a ratings free-fall is how much Donald Trump wants to bang it to the ground? How does Paramount compete with a YouTube and a TikTok (even a TikTok partly owned in the family), never mind navigate Disney-OpenAI and a coming age of anti-original AI slop? How does he handle any of this without massive cuts?

Normally a man in charge of all these assets would have done something to demonstrate how successful he’s been or at least a style he’s taken. But the curiosity of the David Ellison story — or, really, the times in which he’s lived — is that despite 20 years in the business, there are almost no major strategic decisions you can point to that might answer any of these questions. 

Instead we are left only with the experience of other ascendant owners who’ve come into moguldom with big talk and fresh dreams only to leave with a golden parachute and a lot of ruined departments. (A certain current WB mogul comes to mind.)

“I’ve been wounded before, hasn’t let me go.” That’s from “Can I Believe You?” Right now it’s the only question that matters.