David Ellison Says He Doesn’t Have an Especially Close Relationship with Donald Trump

He sat at the Kennedy Center with Donald Trump, he attended a UFC fight on the White Lawn that his company streamed, he hosted a springtime dinner honoring the president and he just dined at a state dinner Trump hosted for Chinese President Xi Jinping that CNN was barred from. But David Ellison says he is not unusually close with Trump nor playing politics in the last year as he sought to get a Warner Bros. deal approved.

“We have a good relationship with this administration. We also had a good relationship with the Biden administration,” the Skydance chief told reporters Tuesday afternoon, also citing a “good relationship with Gov. Gavin Newsom.”

“It’s important to talk to everyone on both sides of the aisle,” he said. “We don’t want to politicize.”

The mogul was responding to a question at a press event on the Paramount lot — on the day his deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery officially closed — on whether he believed he was unhealthily close to the Trump administration. Ellison cited the presence of other entertainment figures like Ari Emanuel and various tech execs at the UFC fight, though of course they have come under fire themselves for their coziness with the president. Trump, meanwhile, cited the Ellisons and larger team at Skydance as “terrific people” in Washington on Tuesday, according to a White House pool report. Earlier in the day, at a Town Hall on the Warners lot, Ellison also saluted Makan Delrahim, the former Assistant Attorney General at the Justice Department in Trump I. Delrahim helped guide Skydance through the regulatory process on the WBD acquisition.

Historically, media executives, at least in the C-suite, have tried to maintain good ties with both parties given how quickly the winds in Washington can shift. But that has become harder as both left-wing advocates have called on executives to take a stand while Trump, FCC chair Brendan Carr and others aligned with the administration have singled out entertainment leaders they don’t approve of.

While there has been fervent worry in press circles about the thumb Trump could put on the scale at CNN after Ellison takes over, the mogul said that nothing about his track record should give people pause.

“We haven’t talked to any political party about news,” Ellison said, though that might depends how the term “we” is defined — a Guardian report last November said Ellison’s father Larry, a major bankroller of the WBD deal, discussed with Trump the possibility of axing a pair of CNN hosts. David Ellison said Tuesday that any conversations with politicians have only been about how “we want to be in the truth business and the trust business.”

The younger Ellison also said his trips to DC have been about working towards a federal film tax credit and cited his relationship with South Carolina senator Tim Scott (R) who has been pushing for the idea, though Ellison’s role in the ongoing effort is debatable given how much credit Hollywood ambassador Jon Voight has received, including from the White House itself.

Political backbiting wasn’t too far from Ellison’s mind, though. In a remark that seemed aimed at former Paramount controlling shareholder Shari Redstone as well as a bevy of Warner Bros. executives going back to before the AT&T days, he said of today’s acquisition, “Let’s just set the table for a second and like zoom out to how we got here, right. With all the respect in the world to everybody that has existed at these companies prior, how we got here to a place where Paramount could be acquired and Warner Brothers could be acquired is the businesses didn’t disrupt themselves over a decade ago. They allowed Netflix to disrupt their business. They allowed Amazon Prime Video to come and disrupt their business. They they didn’t transform and they they held on to the past for too long, and you know it is a certainty that if you don’t disrupt your business, somebody else will do it.”

He added, “I think if you’re being intellectually honest, you need to zoom out and to see that the symptoms of this go back a long time.”