Mar 5, 2026
by Purpose Foundation
$110 billion – and the bid race is over: On February 27, 2026, Warner Bros. Discovery announced that it would accept a takeover offer from Paramount after deeming it superior, following Netflix’s withdrawal from the race. The deal would further consolidate the U.S. media landscape, bringing together two major film studios, streaming platforms such as Paramount+ and HBO Max, and influential cable networks including CBS and CNN under a single corporate umbrella.The who-buys-what-game sounds all too familiar. Well, well, another buyout, what’s the news here? But this announcement is more than just another entertainment merger.
Warner Bros. owns assets that shape both culture and public debate. Whoever ultimately controls this media constellation gains significant influence over how information, narratives, and political discourse circulate in American society – and potentially beyond. Important note here: The deal is not yet set and done. Warner Bros. shareholders still need to approve, and while the U.S. media regulator FCC does obviously not see any bigger problems with the acquisition (agency chief Brendan Carr told the Financial Times this week that the review would probably be just a ‘pro forma’ one), the plans are now expected to face investigation from U.S. antitrust authorities concerned about increasing market concentration.
But Warner Bros. is actually not the only place where the question of who controls the infrastructure of modern communication has surfaced. Only weeks earlier, in January 2026, TikTok’s U.S. operations were transferred into American hands after the U.S. Congress forced TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to divest or exit the American market. Lawmakers argued that a platform used by more than 150 million Americans – not only for entertainment but also to consume news, shape political opinions, and participate in public discourse – posed unacceptable risks if controlled by a foreign company.
At first glance, these developments may appear unrelated. One concerns a social media platform under scrutiny for data security and potential foreign political influence; the other a legacy media merger in an already concentrated entertainment market. Yet both raise fundamental questions about corporate ownership.
Much of the current debate surrounding these deals revolves around two closely related issues. The first concerns the who of ownership: whether the Ellison family (widely known for its proximity to U.S. President Donald Trump and emerging as a central owner behind these companies) is the appropriate owner of such influential platforms. The second concerns the question of power over markets – who dominates which market, whether competition is weakened, and whether markets remain open and well-functioning.
What these discussions largely leave aside is another, equally important question – and opportunity: the how of ownership. How is ownership structured in the first place such that individual owners or families are able to acquire – and retain – control over companies that shape key infrastructures of public communication and culture? And how do these ownership structures shape corporate incentives, influencing how companies behave in markets and the extent to which they pursue market dominance?
This article therefore seeks to broaden the perspective on ownership as a source of power. It argues that while regulators typically confront the consequences of ownership structures ex post, greater attention can be paid to ownership itself in order to address these issues ex ante – tackling not only the outcomes of corporate behaviour, but also its underlying causes.
Digital platforms like TikTok increasingly function as civic infrastructure. They host public debate, shape cultural norms, and influence elections. Yet they remain owned and operated within a system largely structured around private financial incentives.
Like most large digital platforms, TikTok operates under a business logic geared toward generating and maximizing profits by keeping users on the platform for as long as possible. And as experience across social media platforms has shown, what drives profit is often misaligned with what serves the public interest. Content that polarizes, provokes, or misleads frequently generates the highest engagement, and with it, the greatest revenue.
So, given the national security framing of TikTok’s ownership change, one might have expected an additional criterion to guide the restructuring: that control over such a socially central platform would be placed in a form of ownership that clearly aligned with the public interest. If the stated goal was to safeguard democracy, should the ownership structure not reflect that ambition?
Instead, ownership ultimately landed with a consortium of largely U.S.-based investors, corporations and private equity firms, including Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX (more about them here). Oracle – TikTok’s long-time cloud partner – has also been appointed the platform’s “security trustee,” responsible for overseeing compliance with U.S. regulations.
Among the investors, one figure particularly stands out: Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle and a long-time ally of Donald Trump. Critics have raised concerns not only about political alignment but also about the degree of influence such ownership could exert over data, algorithms and platform governance – both through direct ownership stakes in the new US venture and through Oracle’s role as security trustee. As one law and technology professor told The New York Times, he fears ‘that Americans may have traded fears of foreign propaganda for the reality of domestic propaganda.’
But this dynamic is not entirely unique to TikTok. While traditional media operate under a different business logic than digital platforms – and news organizations such as CNN have historically been guided not only by commercial considerations but also by professional norms of journalism – they nevertheless exist within the same ownership framework of shareholder-value capitalism, as the US media landscape is largely privately owned and highly commercialized. This is nothing new, as historically, the journalistic maxime of objective reporting and a “free flow of information” in fact originates in economic considerations: freedom of press and freedom of trade are two sides of the same coin. Nevertheless, journalistic values like independent reporting have endured over the course of time. But today, almost all big journalistic media are part of large entertainment corporations, and they can be bought and sold like any other commercial asset, even when large parts of the public question whether the new owner would be an appropriate steward of such influence. That dynamic becomes now visible with the attempted acquisition of Warner Bros. by Paramount.
Paramount Pictures, recently acquired by Skydance Media, is led by a name we have already encountered: David Ellison – Larry Ellison’s son, who just like his father holds widely reported ties to Donald Trump. Warner Bros., in turn, owns major media assets, including CNN, one of the few networks that has consistently taken a critical stance toward Trump and his administration. And while Trump has repeatedly dismissed CNN as “fake media”, it might now soon be owned by one of his biggest supporters (If you are not familiar with the case, you can read more about the bidding race for Warner Bros. here).
While the consolidation of power in the media industry is clearly an issue from an economic perspective, the loss of independent reporting is also worrying on a broader scale. Ultimately, it also threatens freedom and democracy as societal core values. Even though the basic idea of objective reporting has its origins in economic considerations, it has led to the much-cited socio-political function of independent media as the ‘fourth estate’ in a democracy, which is at stake as a result of the developments outlined. And in the case of the Ellison family, observers have warned that their expanding media footprint could rival – or even surpass – the historic and likewise controversial influence of the Murdoch family.
To be clear here once again, the Paramount deal remains subject to review by U.S. antitrust authorities, and approval is far from guaranteed, as the merger would significantly increase Paramount’s market power.
But regardless of the regulatory outcome, one thing becomes clear: in a climate where independent media is getting scarcer, where political actors are increasingly seeking influence over media, and where that influence can easily be bought with money, we need to look much more closely at the paradigms and legal structures behind deals like these – and start challenging them. After all, should institutions as central to democracy as the independent press really be governed by the same logic as any other tradable asset?
In both the TikTok and Paramount cases, concerns about corporate power are very much present in public debate. Yet they tend to be framed in a particular way: as questions of who owns what – both in terms of markets and in terms of individuals.
On this basis, regulations such as antitrust law come into play. Antitrust plays an important role in safeguarding competitive markets. They do this by evaluating the outcomes of such deals: the degree of concentration usually within a market after firms have already grown large.
At this point, one might object that TikTok and Warner Bros. do not even operate in the same market, so where is the issue? That is precisely the point! Antitrust law can take cross-market relationships into account when they affect competition – for instance when a company controls both a platform and the content distributed through it. It is not designed, however, to assess the broader societal influence that arises when the same individuals, families, or institutional investors come to control several key pillars of information infrastructure – for example when ownership spans both social media platforms such as TikTok and traditional broadcast networks like CNN. Nor is it intended to address cultural and democratic concerns such as journalistic independence, freedom of the press, or the quality of public discourse.
Greater attention could be paid to the structural incentives that guide such firms in the first place. In doing so, another dimension – or perhaps more precisely, another source – of power comes into view: corporate ownership.
Asking the question of ownership means asking: How control is being structured in these companies (here: particularly companies that shape public discourse), and who benefits from the value they create? And how do these ownership structures influence the incentives under which those companies operate? These questions often remain outside the frame of public debate. Ownership and how it’s usually structured is taken for granted.
Venture capitalist Peter Thiel, a controversial figure due to his criticism of democratic institutions, once remarked that “competition is for losers” – a phrase that reflects the incentives embedded in shareholder-driven capitalism, and in the ownership structures built around it. An institutional logic that continues to produce companies that increasingly threaten the very idea of free markets and competition.
So, if we want to address the question of corporate power more fundamentally, we need to focus on corporate ownership itself. This is where the incentive structures and power–capital relations of firms are formed – making it possible to shape them ex ante, rather than merely containing their excesses ex post.
Ownership is a central force shaping how companies behave in markets and society. It determines who ultimately holds power, which incentives prevail, and what kinds of actors markets produce. Yet because shareholder-value capitalism has normalized a particular corporate logic, the structure of ownership itself rarely enters the debate. The prevailing model is often treated as a given. In reality, it is neither inevitable nor a law of corporate physics. It is simply one institutional design among others. But certainly one that dominates modern capitalism.
So, if ownership shapes incentives, and incentives shape corporate behavior, then changing ownership can change outcomes. Instead of focusing solely on correcting corporate behavior or limiting corporate power ex-post, we can look more closely at the ex-ante dimension: the way companies themselves are structured.
And the truth that might still sound new to some ears is: Ownership can be designed differently. It can go beyond the business-as-usual power-equals-money logic. By separating control from economic rights, steward-ownership, for instance, ensures that companies remain independent and mission-driven. And independent companies are a prerequisite for healthy competition – which, in our eyes, is not for losers, but a core pillar of a free and democratic society and economy. If we follow Colin Mayer (University of Oxford, watch his captivating speech here or browse through his speech here) in his argument that “a purpose of a business is to solve problems”, then we need to build companies that engage in a competition for the best solutions to the various challenges we as societies and human beings are facing, instead of striving for more market power in order to maximize short-term shareholder value.
And we’ll see this: Firms can still compete vigorously in markets and within capitalism without being driven solely by short-term capital maximization. Companies guided by broader commitments (to their mission, their stakeholders, or their long-term impact) can still allocate resources efficiently and innovate (research shows they can even be more innovative, more sustainable, more resilient), while potentially generating fewer of the excesses that later require regulatory correction.
Advocating for alternative ownership forms is therefore not an argument against markets. On the contrary, it takes them seriously. If decentralized markets are the most effective way we know to allocate resources, then it becomes crucial to ask what kinds of actors ownership structures produce within those markets. That surely does not eliminate all dysfunctional behavior: markets remain imperfect, and regulation remains necessary. But it can reduce the structural incentives that make such dysfunctional behaviour likely in the first place. Regulation will always remain necessary, but better ownership design can hopefully reduce how often it needs to intervene.
And if we strive to have independently acting organisations also when it comes to such pivotal infrastructures like digital platforms, journalistic outlets and cable networks, we need to talk about how ownership is designed and which ownership model would be most suitable. Because this is the level at which independence and mission orientation can ultimately be implemented.