David Ellison Meets the Press, Talks Paramount and CBS Vision With Gerry Cardinale, Jeff Shell

variety.com:

Matt Donnelly Senior Film Writer Less than 24 hours after sealing an agreement to buy Paramount Global, David Ellison moved into mogul mode for the first time on Monday morning, addressing investors and, later, a gaggle of media reporters to discuss his milestone Skydance-Paramount Global deal.

As Chairman and CEO of the enlarged Paramount, Ellison will now occupy a space he hasn’t before: sitting at the levers of power for a multinational company behind content production and distribution, news, sports and gaming. “My first job was as a computer programmer at Oracle,” the Skydance founder recalled to reporters Monday morning, following his presentation to Paramount Global investors.

His tech background plays heavily into his vision for the merged company. The son of billionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellison, David and his investors are blaring the message that the new Paramount will be a “confluence of art, first and foremost, working hand in hand with technology.” But, how?

Ellison offered Skydance Animation’s forthcoming feature film “Spellbound” as an example. The John Lasseter-shepherded project used a proprietary Oracle product called Studio in the Cloud to build the project and organize data around it. “That had incredible cost efficiencies, but also improved efficiencies, where it was less expensive and faster and superior,” he said. “We view this time period as being pretty similar to some of the transitions that some of the traditional tech companies went through, such as Microsoft and Oracle, where they disrupted their own businesses to have all-time highs.” During the 22-minute interview call, Ellison spoke alongside Jeff Shell, the former NBCUniversal CEO who has been named president of the enlarged.