John Oliver has torn into the MAGA nepo baby whose rampage across the media industry could soon swallow up the comedian’s show.
The late-night comic veered off course from another segment to discuss 43-year-old Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison.
Oliver was talking about UnitedHealthcare’s record of failing desperate customers on Sunday’s edition of Last Week Tonight ahead of the sentencing in December of Luigi Mangione, who pleaded guilty in court last month to killing the group’s CEO Brian Thompson.
The British comic noted that Mangione has amassed an online following among those who also take a dim view of UnitedHealthcare’s history of denying life-saving care. Oliver cited the example of a woman whose parents were forced to pay for her cancer treatment.
“Now, in the end, her parents paid $95,000 out of pocket to cover the treatment, which in happy news did actually work, but having access to wealthy parents just cannot be the system to get badly needed healthcare—even if it is apparently the system that lets you be in charge of HBO,” he said, pulling up a picture of Ellison.
Ellison, whose father is tech billionaire and Republican megadonor Larry Ellison, is gunning to take over HBO, which airs Oliver’s show, after his firm Paramount Skydance reached a $110 billion sale agreement with the network’s parent company, Warner Bros. The elder Ellison is putting up $40.4 billion to backstop that deal.
“Yeah, my soon-to-be business daddy has a literal business daddy,” Oliver went on. “And to be very clear: I deeply respect that and I would never make fun of you for it, unlike that pesky Stephen Colbert.”
That last remark was a nod to just some of the controversy surrounding the younger Ellison’s merger of his firm, Skydance, with Paramount last year.
The merger went through only after Paramount paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Donald Trump alleging that one of its news networks, CBS, had deceptively edited an interview with his former Democratic opponent Kamala Harris to give her an edge in the 2024 polls.
Colbert, whose program, The Late Show, was aired on CBS, called that payment a “big fat bribe,” given the merger had relied on approval from the Federal Communications Commission, which Paramount Skydance subsequently secured.
CBS promptly announced a “purely financial decision” to cancel Colbert’s show. The network has since undergone a conservative programming overhaul, notably at CBS News under new editor-in-chief Bari Weiss.
The Daily Beast has contacted Paramount Skydance for comment on this story.
