Sam Dickie: Fisher Funds expert on the new media moguls looking to buy TikTok

Move over Murdoch family - there's a new set of media moguls looking to make a name for themselves.

Larry Ellison, founder of the software firm Oracle, and his son David are orchestrating media deals which could see them owning big names like CNN, Paramount and TikTok.

Fisher Funds expert Sam Dickie explains further.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
You're listening to a podcast from News Talk sed B.
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Speaker 2 (00:16):
We might be seeing the emergence of a new Murdoch
type media mogul family. The names you need to know
are Larry Allison of Oracle fame and his son David.
They're orchestrating a huge media consolidation controlling everything from paramount
cn CNN now TikTok. Sam Dickey from Fisher Funds is
with us on this, Sam good eating here. So what
are they up to?

Speaker 3 (00:36):
Well, Larry certainly isn't slowing the out of DAYGE eighty one,
so him and a son, David, are attempting to bring
a bring together three things, so massive AI compute power
via Larry's Larry's Oracle, cloud content via the as you said,
David skydoarance paramount, and potential social distribution via owning the
USR of TikTok so first on the cloud compute side,

(01:00):
which will be key in modern media to enable AI
driven content creation and train recommendation engines. Oracle has kind
of always been that the poor fourth cousin behind Amazon,
Microsoft and Google, but he didn't eye popping deal recently
with open Ai. You might have seen it, which saw
Oracle stock prize shoot up about thirty percent in one day,
So that the guts of the deal was Ai signed

(01:22):
a contract to pay Oracle three hundred billion dollars over
five years to train and inference its AI models. And
as an aside here that let's not forget open Ai
only has fifteen billion dollars in revenue in total today
and again it's signed up to pay just one of
its suppliers, Oracle, three hundred billion dollars. But let's ignore
how frothy that is for a minute. And second, on

(01:45):
the content side, they control Paramount, sky Dance and a
rumored to be making a bid for Warner Brothers, so
if all that comes together, they will control HBO, Paramount CBSCNN, Showtime,
and two of the five classic old school movie studios.
And finally, on the New World distribution side, Oracle is
leading a consort, he consortium to buy eighty percent of

(02:06):
tiktoks Us operations for what is pretty much a sweetheart
deal of fourteen billion dollars, so one heck of a footprint.

Speaker 2 (02:15):
Okay, do you think they can pull this off?

Speaker 3 (02:18):
They are in the box seat, So there's a few
pretty obvious things there. So it doesn't hurt that Larry
flirted with being the richest man on the planet briefly
a couple of weeks ago after that blowout deal with
open Ai was announced. And he is exceptionally tight with
President Trump. So he's headlining the project Stargate that you
and I talked about earlier in the year head which

(02:39):
is a half a trillion dollar public private USAI infrastructure project.
So and then of course he has a majority ownership
in Oracle and in Paramount sky Dance pluses clout and connections,
placements the front runner to own TikTok. So I think
they're in good shape.

Speaker 2 (02:54):
Okay, Now is this what we want though? I mean,
do we want to see this kind of media consolidation?
What does it mean for investors?

Speaker 3 (03:00):
Well, I think ethically and from a democracy point of view,
there's obviously a lot of questions from a market point
of view. Like you said that, this very broad media
consolidation play is probably the most far reaching in a
long time. And the only deal in the last thirty
years that was this ambitious was the infamous Aol Time

(03:21):
Warner deal in the year two thousand, just before the
dot com bust, So like this one, it was an
attempt to remember that word convergence we used to talk
about back in the day. It was an attempt to
merge new age distribution via America Online AOL, being a
dominant Internet service provider ISP is a blast from the
pass at the time with content. But that one hundred
and eighty billion dollars deal failed spectacularly and destroyed a

(03:44):
ton of capital. So the current deal is as ambitious
and far reaching and has some of those frothy signs
of that one in two thousand, like the Oracle Open
Ai deal today. However, if it does go ahead and
as successful, if linear TV wasn't dead already, it probably
will be. So this behemoth would control roughly half the
cable TV market in the US, and even streaming platforms

(04:07):
like Disney Plus and Netflix might come under pressure if
you and I start to watch all of our favorite
favorite friends episodes and movies and CNN news directly on
our TikTok apps. Imagine that, but it might even pressure
bohemos like Meta is uncertainty over the future of TikTok,
and the US had definitely temporarily shifted advertiser spend to meta,

(04:29):
so it really is fascinating stuff. So we need to
watch this space.

Speaker 2 (04:32):
That really is quite interesting, Sam, Thanks so much, Sam Dickey,
Officier Funds.

Speaker 1 (04:36):
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