This Billionaire Is Partnering With The Ellisons On The Paramount Deal

Forbes

5 hours ago

T he year-long saga of Skydance Media's $8 billion Paramount takeover is fit for its own Paramount+ mini-series. There's political intrigue with critics slamming departing boss Shari Redstone's apparent capitulation to Donald Trump to get the deal approved, including Paramount's agreement to pay $16 million to Trump's future presidential library to resolve a lawsuit over a 60 Minutes segment on Kamala Harris followed by CBS News' announcement that it was cancelling popular Trump critic Stephen Colbert's late-night show in 2026 (supposedly for financial reasons). Trump celebrated both announcements vociferously.
Then there is the potential family intrigue worthy of a Succession spinoff: David Ellison, the Skydance founder and former Biden backer behind such films as 'Top Gun: Maverick' and 'True Grit', is teaming up with his staunch Republican father Larry Ellison who is the second richest person in the world and founder of software giant Oracle.
Flying under the radar, beneath all the high-stakes drama, is Gerry Cardinale, a private equity investor who is poised to be an influential figure in the new-look Paramount. His firm RedBird Capital Partners is a shareholder in Skydance, having first invested in 2020. Now the firm is putting in $1.8 billion towards the $8 billion purchase price. Cardinale will join Paramount as a director and will appoint a yet-to-be-named second director. Jeff Shell, former CEO of NBCUniversal who chairs RedBird's sports and media business, will join Paramount as president. Andy Gordon, head of RedBird's West Coast office, will become Paramount's chief operating officer and chief strategic officer.
Under the new ownership structure, RedBird will hold 22.5% of Paramount's voting rights, while David Ellison will hold 50% and Larry, who is Skydance's biggest investor, will hold the remaining 27.5%. This complicated familial-financial dynamic is likely to make Cardinale a pivotal voice in scenarios where the Ellisons butt heads.
Paramount will become Cardinale's highest-profile investment but it's hardly his first big bet. In the worlds of sports, entertainment and media, the 57-year-old investor has been striking high-stakes deals for over a quarter of a century, first at Goldman Sachs and for the last decade at RedBird, which he founded in 2014. RedBird bought Italian football club A.C. Milan for $1.2 billion in 2022, and has backed household names like Lebron James, Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, and Ben Affleck and Matt Damon in their independent entertainment ventures. It has also hired big names like Jeff Zucker, former CNN president, who is now leading its acquisition of British broadsheet The Telegraph (alongside co-investor Abu Dhabi-based firm IMI) for $675 million. The firm has also invested a smaller portion of its funds capital ($1.5 billion) on financial services companies.
Its willingness to dive into the nitty-gritty of portfolio companies and their operations has helped RedBird grow to $12 billion in assets under management with 100 investment professionals across six global offices. 'I like playing shadow entrepreneur and solving problems with capital,' Cardinal said on Bloomberg podcast The Deal last year. It's been a winning recipe so far: RedBird has delivered 2.5 times gross multiple of capital and a 33% internal rate of return, according to a person familiar with the matter. Cardinale owns 100% of RedBird, filings show, and Forbes estimates he is worth $1.8 billion. (He declined to comment on his net worth or be interviewed for this article).
W all Street glory was not always in the cards for Cardinale, who once harbored dreams of being a diplomat. Born in 1967, he grew up in the leafy Main Line suburbs outside Philadelphia, the son of a trial attorney. He later studied social studies at Harvard, where he rowed heavyweight crew and graduated with honors before studying politics and political theory at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Later on, he took a job at a Japanese think tank in Tokyo where he got a front-row seat to the effects of globalization. At the time, he was still considering law school, or getting his PhD in political theory. 'I wasn't one of these Wharton kids who knew I wanted to go to Wall Street from day one,' Cardinale recalled on The Deal.
But meeting with investment bankers in Tokyo convinced Cardinale that finance would be a rewarding (and no doubt lucrative) career path. He joined Goldman Sachs as an analyst in 1992, the same year he published an article on Japanese anti-American sentiment and rising trade tensions in the academic journal Asian Survey . (His strong interest in Japan is something he shares with Larry Ellison, who has a Japanese art collection and modeled his Woodside, California home after a 16th century Japanese emperor's palace.) Cardinale worked at the bank's Hong Kong and Singapore offices before settling in the New York office in 1997 to work in the telecom, media and technology group as an investment banker. He later joined the bank's principal investment division, where he made his name persuading Yankees owner George Steinbrenner to launch the YES regional sports network in 2001. The project was finalized the day before September 11, and Goldman Sachs ended up backstopping the deal with a $335 million private equity investment after another investor pulled out.
Though risky, the deal turned into a huge success, and Goldman made Cardinale a partner in 2004. A few years later in 2008, he persuaded Dallas Cowboys' billionaire owner Jerry Jones to team up with Steinbrenner to create the sports stadium concessions business Legends Hospitality, which investment firm Sixth Street Partners acquired a majority stake of in 2021.
Cardinale left Goldman in 2013 and briefly worked at merchant bank BDT, founded by fellow Goldman alum Byron Trott, whom he'd previously done deals with. (BDT later merged with Michael Dell's family office to become BDT & MSD, and the firm has advised outgoing Paramount boss Shari Redstone). Cardinale founded RedBird in 2014 and raised $665 million for an inaugural fund from high-net-worth backers he'd met while at Goldman (their identities have not been disclosed) and an anchor investment from the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, which he also had a preexisting relationship with.
RedBird became Skydance's second largest investor in 2020 when it led a $275 million capital raise. It backed Skydance again in 2022 when it raised another $400 million at a $4 billion valuation. RedBird's $1.8 billion cash outlay to buy Paramount represents 15% of its total assets under management.
T he potential rewards from investing in Paramount are great but so are the risks: Between the inexorable decline of linear television, competition between streaming platforms, an existing $14.2 billion long-term debt load, and possible viewer blowback to perceived capitulation to Trump, Paramount faces a raft of challenges under its new ownership group.
'[It] has the potential to overwhelm RedBird's portfolio,' Paul Wachter, the founder of Main Street Advisors, said earlier this year in a Harvard Business Review case study on RedBird. 'Turning Paramount around is going to be an enormous amount of work.' (Wachter also said he believes the investment will be a success 'because the executives are smart and highly motivated.')
From Cardinale's perspective, the new Paramount—with its more than 1,200 film titles, distribution rights to another 2,400 films, and roster of television networks emblazoned in the American viewer psyche—is the perfect candidate to receive the RedBird treatment. 'What we do at RedBird is we look for ways of monetizing world-class IP. This is an over 100-year-old business…with really high-quality intellectual property,' he said last year on The Town, Puck founder Matthew Belloni's podcast, after the Skydance-Paramount deal was announced. 'We're not just deal guys looking to do a deal; we're not just private equity guys looking to go buy something.'
While investors eye the numbers, media critics and consumers will be waiting to see how Skydance follows through on what the FCC described as its 'written commitments to ensure that the new company's programming embodies a diversity of viewpoints from across the political and ideological spectrum' and to 'adopt measures that can root out the bias that has undermined trust in the national news media.' There are reasons to believe the new Paramount will be less Trumpy than some fear: David Ellison gave around $1 million to Joe Biden's reelection campaign, and Cardinale, while not a megadonor, has previously given to both Democrats and Republicans.
In any case, Cardinale has more to worry about than politics. With its massive debt load and facing structural headwinds, the new-look Paramount is crying out for a financier who understands the industry and is willing to stake his reputation on it. The test begins when the deal closes - which could happen any day now.
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