When you owe $87 billion, you can't be picky about where the money comes from.

That's the situation at Skydance, the media giant run by David Ellison. In 2025, Skydance merged with Paramount. On October 6, it closed a roughly $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, bringing CNN, CBS News, HBO, Warner Bros., and TNT Sports under one roof. Those deals left the company carrying about $87 billion in debt.

So Skydance went looking for investors, and one of them, reportedly, was Elon Musk, with a check for $1 billion.

The man CNN's anchors and commentators have spent years warning America about is now helping keep CNN's parent company afloat.

The connection runs deep. David Ellison's father, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, put $1 billion into Musk's purchase of Twitter in 2022 and once sat on Tesla's board. He also personally guaranteed more than $40 billion in financing to help his son buy Warner Bros. Discovery. When the Ellisons needed money, Musk was someone they knew they could call.

CNN's newsroom was already miserable before Musk entered the picture. When it became clear in February that Ellison would win the bidding war, CNN staffers told NBC News the mood was "shaken" and "depressing." Many had been rooting for Netflix.

"No one wants to work for the Ellisons," one CNN on-air journalist said. Pointing to the changes Ellison made at CBS News, where he brought in Bari Weiss to shake things up, the journalist warned: "if Bari is going to be running CNN, expect people to leave."

Outside the building, the left was apocalyptic. Former CNN correspondent Jim Acosta declared that "America now has state-compromised media." Ron Filipkowski of the left-wing MeidasTouch network wrote: "This will be the end of CNN."

Now add Musk to that picture. He's the owner of X, the former head of the Department of Government Efficiency, and the Republican Party's biggest donor. This week, Democrats in Congress made clear they want to investigate him if they win the majority in November. Their favorite cable network's parent company just took his money.

"How many CNN employees will quit after this?" asked conservative commentator Benny Johnson.

Musk doesn't get the keys to the newsroom. A stake in the parent company doesn't make him CNN's boss. Chairman and CEO Mark Thompson still runs the network, and a court-approved settlement with California's attorney general requires an editorial independence board for CNN and CBS News.

But the people panicking about Musk weren't worried about who owns CNN when the money came from someone they liked. Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs' widow and a major Democratic donor, sits on Skydance's board and reportedly invested alongside Musk. Nobody on the left is losing sleep over her stake. Their objection was never to billionaires owning newsrooms. It's to this one.

The debt makes the situation even more awkward for CNN. Skydance has promised at least $6 billion a year in cost savings within three years. With $87 billion to pay down, every division will have to prove it's worth the money, including a cable news network that has spent years losing viewers. The company deciding where to cut now counts Musk among the investors who helped keep it solvent.

Neither Musk nor Skydance has commented on the reported investment. Skydance's stock jumped about 6% when the news broke, then fell back.

When Musk bought Twitter in 2022, his critics warned that one billionaire shouldn't have that much say over what Americans see and read. Four years later, CNN's parent company is $87 billion in debt and has a billion dollars of Musk's money helping cover its bills.