In Hollywood’s golden age, moguls built their empires with cameras and scripts. In today’s algorithmic age, moguls build theirs with data and influence.
The Ellisons
Larry, the Oracle billionaire, and his son David, the Hollywood producer are buying companies together with cultures.
If their plans succeed, Warner Bros and TikTok could soon live under the same family roof. On paper, it’s a business story. They've already acquired paramount.
The merging of old media’s nostalgia with new media’s virality. But beneath this might be the most dangerous consolidation of cultural power in modern America.
Because this is not just about who makes movies or who hosts videos. It’s about who decides what the world watches.
Larry Ellison has always been more than a businessman. He’s a control architect and someone who builds systems that make people dependent on his design. Oracle shaped the digital backbone of corporations long before most people knew what a database was. Now, through his son David, that same philosophy could extend into the bloodstream of entertainment and information.
Warner Bros represents legacy storytelling and the emotional, scripted narratives that shape values and identities.
TikTok represents chaos and the endless stream of dopamine-driven clips that shape habits and opinions.
The Ellisons sitting atop both is like a family owning both the pen and the algorithm that edits the story.
This union exposes something uncomfortable: the line between storytelling and manipulation has disappeared.
Hollywood once sold dreams; TikTok sells attention. The first makes you feel, the second makes you scroll.
If Warner merges its creative power with TikTok’s psychological engineering, entertainment won’t just entertain anymore it will program.
The algorithm will no longer chase trends; it will create them. The characters you love could soon be optimized by code to fit the emotional patterns of your viewing history.
In a way, the Ellisons aren’t inventing anything new. They’re perfecting what every empire has done: control the narrative. From Caesar’s sculptors to Murdoch’s newspapers, those who owned the story owned the people.
But this time, the control isn’t through headlines or censorship it’s through addiction. Imagine an AI-driven Warner Bros film whose trailer, memes, and behind-the-scenes clips are all subtly fine-tuned by TikTok’s algorithm to ensure you can’t stop engaging. That’s not marketing. That’s mindware.
And in this new world, creators become pawns, audiences become data, and the line between art and manipulation fades into pixels.
The Ellisons’ move should spark a question far deeper than
“What’s next for the media?”
It should make us ask
who controls reality itself.
Because if old media gave us meaning, and new media gives us stimulation, this merger threatens to give us neither. We may end up in a world where culture is not written by artists or guided by critics, but generated by predictive models optimizing for engagement.