The War Between Silicon Valley and Hollywood is Officially Over...

Silicon Valley needs creativity, but hates to pay for it. So the war rages on.

But we are now entering the final stage of the war. Silicon Valley is now swallowing up Hollywood. The pace at which this is happening is frightening.

The main protagonist here is a man named David Ellison—a tech scion who wants to be the biggest mogul in the movie industry. A few days ago, his father Larry Ellison became (briefly) the richest man in the world.

Ellison is founder of Oracle, a database software company with a market cap of almost a trillion dollars. That’s nice work if you can get it. But his son David wanted to do something more fun than databases, so he dropped out of college to dabble in movies.

But this quickly became more than dabbling. He produced hit franchise films, notably the Mission Impossible movies. He didn’t care much about artsy cinema—and instead churned out Baywatch and Spy Kids. Like his dad, he knows how to make money.

And then he went on a spending spree. It’s not hard to do that in Hollywood if you have a big pile of cash. Many of the legendary properties from the past have fallen on hard times, and can be acquired from their current owners at a very reasonable price.

So David Ellison bought up National Amusements and merged it into his production company. This gave him control over

• Paramount Pictures

• CBS (and CBS News)

• MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, and other cable TV channels

• Paramount+ and Pluto TV streaming platforms

But now he is preparing a takeover of Warner Bros Discovery—which would put him in charge of Warner Bros film and television studios

• HBO

• CNN

• TNT

And it doesn’t stop there.

Oracle, the company founded by David Ellison’s father, will now be one of the new owners of TikTok. So in one generation, the Ellison family has gone from software entrepreneurs to the biggest powerhouse in film and media.

What’s next?

The most attractive remaining asset in Hollywood is Disney. It’s just a matter of time before it gets swallowed up by the techies. The most likely outcome is Apple acquiring Disney, but some other Silicon Valley powerhouse could also do this deal.

There’s so much money in NorCal, and a lot of techies would like to own their own famous mouse (along with theme parks and all the rest). Musk could do it. Zuckerberg could do it. Alphabet could do it. Even some company you don’t think much about, like Broadcom (market cap = $1.6 trillion), could easily finance this deal.

There’s heavy irony in this fact. That’s because Disney helped launch Silicon Valley.

There’s a garage on Addison Avenue in Palo Alto that’s called the birthplace of Silicon Valley. But that birthing only happened because Walt Disney gave Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard an order for eight audio oscillators—which gave them enough cash and confidence to create their garage-born company.

Hewlett-Packard trained the next generation of tech entrepreneurs, including Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple. So an Apple buyout of Disney would simply take things full circle.

There are still some chess pieces on the board, and a few moves left to be made—but the winner of this game is already obvious. Hollywood, or what’s left of it, will become a subsidiary of tech interests. I don’t see any other outcome.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: Hollywood Boulevard in the 1930s