CNN's newsroom has had a rough year. Then it got worse.
Elon Musk has reportedly put $1 billion into Skydance, the media company that now owns CNN.
Skydance, led by David Ellison, closed its roughly $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery on October 6. The deal put CNN, CBS News, HBO, Warner Bros., Paramount, and TNT Sports under one roof. It also left the company with about $87 billion in debt. Musk's money reportedly came in alongside other investors to help shore up the new giant.
So the network that has spent years telling America Musk is a menace now belongs to a company he's helping keep afloat.
CNN's staff saw trouble coming before Musk entered the picture. When it became clear in February that Ellison would win the bidding war, CNN employees told NBC News the mood was "shaken" and "depressing." Much of the company had been rooting for Netflix instead.
"No one wants to work for the Ellisons," one CNN on-air journalist said. Looking at the changes Ellison made at CBS News, where he brought in Bari Weiss to shake up the newsroom, the same journalist warned: "if Bari is going to be running CNN, expect people to leave."
The left treated the takeover as a catastrophe. Former CNN correspondent Jim Acosta declared that "America now has state-compromised media." Ron Filipkowski of the left-wing MeidasTouch network predicted: "This will be the end of CNN."
That was before the Elon Musk news.
Musk is the man CNN's hosts and commentators have spent years warning viewers about: the owner of X, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, and the Republican Party's biggest donor. Just this week, Democrats in Congress made clear they plan to investigate him if they win back the majority in November. Now a slice of the money behind CNN's parent company is his.
Conservative commentator Benny Johnson summed up the question on a lot of minds: "How many CNN employees will quit after this?"
The Musk connection is no accident. David Ellison's father, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, is one of Musk's closest allies in business. He sat on Tesla's board and put $1 billion into Musk's purchase of Twitter in 2022. He also personally guaranteed more than $40 billion in financing to help his son buy Warner Bros. Discovery. Musk has publicly praised the Ellisons, and media mogul John Malone has even floated the idea of a much larger SpaceX investment and a content partnership down the road.
To be clear, a stake in the parent company doesn't hand Musk control of CNN's newsroom. CNN's chief executive, Mark Thompson, still runs the network, and a court-approved settlement with California's attorney general requires an editorial independence board for CNN and CBS News. But the same people who never minded that big Wall Street firms own pieces of nearly every media company are suddenly worried about who owns theirs.
They had no complaints when CNN took money from Qatar to help fund its operation in Doha.
Neither Musk nor Skydance has commented on the reported investment. Skydance's stock jumped about 6% when the news broke, then fell back.
For years, CNN's primetime lineup treated every Musk post as a national emergency. Its new parent company's balance sheet now has a billion dollars of his money on it.