The new media titan may have a billion-dollar fortune, but he’s not a member of our billionaires list.
By Alicia Park, Reporter.
Paramount Skydance closed its long-awaited takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery on Tuesday. The deal puts CEO David Ellison in charge of a Hollywood conglomerate (renamed simply Skydance) that stretches from CBS and Paramount Pictures to HBO, CNN and the Warner Bros. studio. It also gives Ellison a $150 million payday, between a cash bonus and restricted stock for pulling off the deal. That nine-figure windfall would be life-changing for almost anyone, but it’s more or less pocket change for David, whose father Larry Ellison is the cofounder of software giant Oracle and the world’s eighth-richest person.
Forbes estimates that David Ellison’s personal net worth is more than $1 billion, thanks to his windfall from the merger, his existing stash of Paramount stock and multiple homes. But the main source of his fortune is his father, who is worth an estimated $185 billion. Larry Ellison backed David’s initial media production company, Skydance; he put in much of the equity to fund Skydance’s acquisition of Paramount; and he personally guaranteed more than $45 billion of this week’s $110 billion megamerger. David holds nearly all of the voting rights for the Ellisons’ voting 77.5% control of the new company, but nearly all the money is actually Larry’s.
Such deliberately complex, and often opaque, intrafamily dealings are one of the reasons Forbes typically credits all the wealth created by the founder of a fortune to that person, even if he or she has passed some of it on to their heirs. That’s why you won’t find David Ellison on our World’s Billionaires list anytime soon—we list his fortune under Larry & family.
David has been inheriting pieces of the Ellison empire his entire life. Born in 1983, he and his sister Megan were raised mostly by their mother, Barbara Boothe, Ellison’s third of six wives. Larry has told friends he regrets missing much of his children’s early years, Vanity Fair reported, while he was building Oracle into a database software giant.
When Oracle went public in 1986, Larry set aside 90,000 shares for David, then three, and Megan, a newborn. That would amount to about 29 million shares today, after several stock splits, worth more than $4 billion. Records show the stake shrinking to under 1 million shares by 2012—the last time the number was made public in filings. Where the rest went is anyone’s guess, but if David’s half was sold gradually, taxed and invested conservatively, it would be worth about $300 million today, by Forbes’ estimates. The children got similar stakes in NetSuite, a business software company that Larry backed early. (When Oracle bought NetSuite in 2016, David’s trust raked in about $370 million before taxes in the deal, which Forbes estimates would be worth around $500 million today.)
Flying eventually brought father and son together. Hooked after seeing Top Gun, David got his first plane from his father at 13, soloed on his 16th birthday and, at 20, became the youngest member of an elite stunt-flying team at the Oshkosh air show. He’s still a licensed pilot.
Hollywood came next. While studying film at USC, David starred in Flyboys, a 2006 World War I movie that cost its investors—reportedly largely Larry Ellison—$65 million but took in $18 million. He soon quit acting, dropped out of college and, with his father’s money, started production company Skydance—named after a term for stunt flying. After its first hit, True Grit, in 2011, a partnership with Paramount produced five Mission: Impossible movies, two Star Trek films and Top Gun: Maverick—the sequel to the flick that first hooked him on flying. His sister, Megan, took a similar but riskier path with indie films, notching big hits with the likes of Zero Dark Thirty and American Hustle before getting a bailout from Larry amid financial troubles in 2019
David’s ambitions turned out to be far bigger. In 2024, he expanded Skydance dramatically when he won the race to buy Paramount from its longtime owner, Shari Redstone, with an $8 billion offer. About $6 billion of it came from his father; private equity firm RedBird Capital supplied the rest. The deal closed in August 2025. David almost immediately went after an even bigger fisher, Warner Bros. “David is the golden child,” a former executive who worked for Larry told Vanity Fair.
Snagging Warner Bros. took nearly a year of fighting: Warner first agreed to sell to Netflix last December, but David launched a hostile bid and kept raising his price until Netflix walked away in February—after Paramount Skydance offered $110 billion, more than 40% of it guaranteed by Larry. A dozen state attorneys general then sued to block the transaction on antitrust grounds. Paramount settled the matter last month by, among other things, agreeing to protect the independence of CNN.
David will now have to steer two aging studios with billions in new debt in an industry upended by streaming. With his fortune secured and his empire assembled, now comes the hard part: running the show.
