Paramount Skydance, led by David Ellison, has received commitments of nearly $24 billion to back its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery from three Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) agreed to provide about $10 billion to Paramount, with the state-controlled funds of Qatar and Abu Dhabi providing the remainder of the $24 billion, the Journal reported, citing anonymous sources.
Reps for Paramount did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Paramount’s deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, which has a $111 billion enterprise value, is pending regulatory approvals. The companies have said they expect the deal to close by the end of the third quarter of 2026. Last month, the acting head of the DOJ’s antitrust division, Omeed Assefi, said the Paramount-WBD deal will “absolutely not” be on a fast-track for approval due to political reasons, in the context of the Ellison family’s friendly ties to Trump.
WBD has set April 23 for a special shareholders meeting to vote on the Paramount Skydance transaction.
Paramount’s offer for WBD as of Dec. 1 included an aggregate of $24 billion from the Middle Eastern funds, per an SEC filing at the time. Since then, the company has not disclosed how much the three funds might be contributing toward its winning bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, which WBD’s board of directors accepted in February after Netflix opted to not counter Paramount’s $31/share offer.
Meanwhile, in December, Paramount said Chinese gaming and internet company Tencent, which had committed $1 billion to the Paramount Skydance bid, was no longer a financing partner because of the WBD board’s concerns over foreign ownership. However, Tencent was back on board as an investor in the deal with fresh funding, Bloomberg News reported last month.
In earlier SEC filings, Paramount Skydance said the three Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds “have agreed to forgo any governance rights — including board representation — associated with their non-voting equity investments.” According to Paramount, that means the deal “will not be within CFIUS’s jurisdiction,” referring to the U.S.’s intra-agency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, led by the Treasury Department, which reviews foreign investments in American businesses for potential national security risks.
Two weeks ago, seven Democratic U.S. senators issued a call for the FCC to conduct a “thorough review” of the foreign investors backing Paramount’s WBD proposed deal in a letter addressed to agency chairman Brendan Carr.
According to the WSJ story, because each of the Middle Eastern wealth funds will own “far less” than 25% of the combined company, Paramount execs don’t expect the funds’ involvement “to spark a review” by the FCC.
Separately, earlier last month, Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) slammed the Trump administration’s Treasury Department for failing to initiate a CFIUS national security review of Paramount Skydance‘s WBD deal.
David Ellison’s father, Larry Ellison — co-founder of Oracle and one of the wealthiest multibillionaires — committed up to $46.7 billion toward the winning WBD deal. The participation of the three Middle Eastern funds will reduce the total amount of equity Larry Ellison will need to contribute to the Warner Bros. acquisition.
