Who owns Skydance and who paid for it?

Control sits with the Ellison family and Gerry Cardinale's RedBird Capital, a New York investment firm. The Ellison family owns 77.5% and RedBird 22.5% of a holding company called Harbor Lights, which owns all of Skydance's voting shares. David Ellison runs the company. His father, Oracle co-founder and chairman Larry Ellison, provides the financial muscle. The $110 billion deal is financed with about $47 billion of new equity plus massive debt. Roughly $24 billion of the equity comes from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF), the Qatar Investment Authority and Abu Dhabi's L'Imad Holding. Their shares are non-voting. Bank of America, Citigroup and the private lender Apollo originally committed $54 billion of debt financing. Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders received $31 a share in cash, plus a small daily fee for the delay since 30 September. Paramount also funded Warner's $2.8 billion termination payment to Netflix. Skydance remains public. Since the deal closed on 6 October 2026, its shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange as SKYD. David Ellison is chairman and co-CEO alongside former Mattel boss Ynon Kreiz.