David Ellison, CEO of Paramount Skydance, dined at the White House Thursday evening at the state dinner held for visiting Chinese President Xi Jinping — but the White House shut out reporters for CNN, the Warner Bros. Discovery-owned news network Ellison is on the cusp of gaining control over, as well as MS NOW.
\n\nEllison attended the soiree with his wife, Sandra Lynn Ellison, among a guest list of more than 100 government officials and business execs. Ellison’s Paramount is coming down the home stretch in closing a $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros., after reaching a settlement with 12 Democratic state attorneys general this week. (The judge in the case is still reviewing the proposed settlement, which does not require major concessions from Paramount.) The Paramount-WBD deal was approved by Trump’s Justice Department earlier this year without any conditions.
\n\nAlso attending the state dinner were tech bigwigs including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Apple chairman Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Meta chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella, and Elon Musk.
\n\nOther guests included Fox News’ Bret Baier, Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters; Secretary of Health Robert…
Original source: https://variety.com/