The Billionaires Are Building Their Own Skynet. We’re Cooked

If you needed a sign that the world is about to be taken over by computers, look no further than the monopoly merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery.

The new company will now be known as Skydance, which totally sounds like the first cousin of Skynet, the fictional self-aware artificial superintelligence that was the main antagonist in the Terminator franchise.

And the reason all of this is getting scarier is that a handful of billionaires now own all the information, and how that information reaches the masses.

Think about this: CBS, CNN, HBO, Warner Bros., Paramount, BET, Nickelodeon, TNT, DC, HBO Max, and Paramount+ are now under one corporate umbrella led by CEO David Ellison. The merger creates a media company expected to generate nearly $70 billion in annual revenue and gives Skydance control of two of the country’s biggest news organizations: CBS News and CNN.

That means one corporate structure controls most American children’s programming, superheroes, news, and overall visual entertainment. And we’ve seen how that has gone with CBS News, the hiring of Bari Weiss and the upheaval at arguably the most recognizable news program on television, 60 Minutes.

Weiss wasn’t just running the news department. She was intervening in news coverage, including an episode about Salvadoran prison detainees, insisting that Trump administration comments be included after White House officials declined to participate. Weiss and CBS have disputed the characterization that she was engaging in political interference.

Weiss’s heavy hand on news coverage reportedly contributed to veteran correspondent Scott Pelley’s firing after he confronted the executive producer of 60 Minutes and accused CBS News leadership of pressuring him to include bias and falsehoods in stories. Pelley said he had been instructed to include unverified assertions and accused the new ownership of casting aside the program. CBS said it fired him for cause after his confrontation with new executive producer Nick Bilton.

And that is the part we should be paying attention to.

Because as the people who own newspapers, television networks, movie studios, streaming services, and news organizations become fewer and fewer, the question isn’t simply what they are going to produce. The question is what they can decide not to produce. Which stories get killed. Which voices disappear. Which reporters decide it isn’t worth fighting the boss. Look at the mass exodus of veteran reporters at The Washington Post after billionaire Jeff Bezos took over and made it clear the Opinion section wouldn’t go after Trump.  

That is why monopolies matter. This isn’t about whether you like Batman, SpongeBob, or 60 Minutes. It is about whether a democracy should let an increasingly small number of enormously wealthy people control its information ecosystem. The more concentrated the ownership, the easier it becomes for corporate interests, political relationships, and personal agendas to shape the information Americans receive. And when the same corporate structure owns CBS News and CNN, that isn’t just a Hollywood story. It is a democracy story.

The future we’re walking into doesn’t need Skynet to control information. We already built the machine. We just keep giving fewer and fewer people the keys.

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