David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance has received nearly $24 billion in commitments from three Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds to help buy Warner Bros. Discovery, Variety has confirmed.
The Wall Street Journal first reported that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) has agreed to provide about $10 billion to Paramount, with state funds from Qatar and Abu Dhabi providing the remaining $24 billion, according to a source familiar with the deal.
A Paramount Skydance spokesperson declined to comment.
Paramount’s deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, valued at $111 billion, is pending regulatory approval. The companies said they expect the transaction to close by the end of the third quarter of 2026. Last month, Omeed Assefi, acting head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, said the Paramount-WBD deal would “absolutely” not be quickly approved for political reasons, given the Ellison family’s friendly relationship with President Trump.
WBD has set a special stockholder meeting for April 23 to vote on the Paramount Skydance transaction.
Paramount’s offer for WBD as of Dec. 1 included a total of $24 billion from the Middle East fund, according to SEC filings at the time. Since then, the company has not disclosed how much the three funds contributed to the Warner Bros. Discovery bid, which the WBD board accepted in February after Netflix chose not to compete with Paramount’s $31-per-share offer.
Meanwhile, Paramount announced in December that Chinese gaming and internet company Tencent, which had pledged $1 billion to the Paramount Skydance bid, was no longer a financing partner due to WBD board concerns about foreign ownership. However, Tencent rejoined as an investor in the deal with new funding, Bloomberg News reported last month.
Paramount Skydance said in an earlier SEC filing that three Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds “agreed to waive any governance rights, including board representation, related to non-voting equity investments.” According to Paramount, this means the deal is “not within the jurisdiction of CFIUS,” referring to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a U.S. government agency led by the Treasury Department that reviews foreign investments in U.S. companies for potential national security risks.
Two weeks ago, seven Democratic U.S. senators wrote a letter to Chairman Brendan Carr urging the FCC to conduct a “thorough investigation” into foreign investors supporting the proposed Paramount-WBD deal.
The WSJ article said Paramount executives do not expect the funds’ involvement to “trigger a review” by the FCC because each Middle East wealth fund owns “much less” than 25% of the combined company.
Separately, early last month, Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) criticized the Trump administration’s Treasury Department for not initiating 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 richest billionaires, contributed up to $46.7 billion to the winning WBD deal. The participation of the three Middle East funds will reduce the total amount of equity Larry Ellison will need to contribute to his Warner Bros. acquisition.
