The one -year saga of Paramount’s acquisition by Skydance Media for 8 billion dollars is worthy of a Paramount+miniseries. There is political intrigue, with critics harshly criticizing the apparent capitulation of the outgoing director, Shari Redstone, before Donald Trump to achieve the approval of the agreement, including the Paramount agreement to pay 16 million dollars to the future Trump presidential library to resolve a demand for a segment of 60 Minutes About Kamala Harris, followed by the announcement of CBS News of the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s night program, a popular critic of Trump, in 2026 (supposedly for economic reasons). Trump celebrated both ads vehement.
Then is the family intrigue potential worthy of a spin-off de Succession : David Ellison, the founder of Skydance and former Biden supporter behind films such as “Top Gun: Maverick” and “True Grit”, is associating with his staunch Republican Father Larry Ellison, who is the second richest person in the world and founder of the Oracle software giant.
Under the radar, under all the high -risk drama, is Gerry Cardinale, a private capital investor that is emerging as an influential figure in the renewed Paramount. His signature, Redbird Capital Partners, is Skydance shareholder, having invested for the first time in 2020. Now, the firm contributes $ 1.8 billion of the purchase price of 8,000 million. Cardinale will join Paramount as director and appoint a second director yet to appoint. Jeff Shell, former executive director of NBCuniversal and who presides over the sports and media business of Redbird, will join Paramount as president. Andy Gordon, director of the Redbird office on the west coast, will become the director of Operations and Strategic Director of Paramount.
Under the new property structure, Redbird will have 22.5% of Paramount’s voting rights, while David Ellison will have 50% and Larry, the largest Skydance investor, the remaining 27.5%. This complex family and financial dynamic will probably convert Cardinale into a key voice in conflict situations between the Ellison.
Paramount will become the most outstanding investment of Cardinale, but it is not his first big bet. In the world of sports, entertainment and the media, this 57 -year -old investor has been closing high -risk agreements for more than a century, first in Goldman Sachs and during the last decade in Redbird, which he founded in 2014. Redbird bought the Italian football club AC Milan for 1.2 billion dollars in 2022 and, earlier this year, he agreed to buy the purchase of the British newspaper The Telegraph for 500 million pounds. He has supported figures as well known as LeBron James, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon in their independent entertainment projects. The firm has also invested a smaller part of its capital ($ 1.5 billion) in financial services companies.
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Know the other billionaire behind the Skydance agreement with Paramount
His willingness to deepen the details of the portfolio companies and their operations has helped Redbird grow up to 12,000 million dollars in assets under management, with 100 investment professionals in six global offices. “I like to be an entrepreneur in the shadow and solve problems with capital,” Cardinale said in the podcast de Bloomberg “The Deal” last year. It has been a winning formula to date: Redbird has generated a gross capital multiple of 2.5 times and an internal return rate of 33 %, according to a person familiar with the matter. Cardinale has 100 % Redbird, according to the documents presented, and Forbes It estimates its net assets at 1.8 billion dollars. (He refused to comment on his net assets or to be interviewed for this article).
The glory of the street was not always available to Cardinale, who once dreamed of being a diplomat. Born in 1967, he grew up in the leafy suburbs of Main Line, on the outskirts of Philadelphia, son of a litigating lawyer. Subsequently, he studied social studies in Harvard, where he was part of the heavyweight rowing team and graduated with honors, before studying politics and political theory in Oxford with the Rhodes scholarship. Later, he got a job at a Japanese Studies Center in Tokyo, where he experienced the effects of globalization in the front row. At that time, I was still considering the Faculty of Law or the obtaining of a doctorate in political theory. “He was not one of those young people from Wharton who knew he wanted to go to Wall Street from day one,” Cardinale recalled in The Deal.
But meeting with investment bankers in Tokyo convinced Cardinale that finance would be a gratifying career (and undoubtedly lucrative). He joined Goldman Sachs as an analyst in 1992, the same year he published an article about the Japanese anti -American feeling and the increase in commercial tensions in the academic magazine Asian Survey . (He shares his great interest in Japan with Larry Ellison, who has a Japanese art collection and designed his house in Woodsis, California, from the palace of a 16th -century Japanese emperor). Cardinale worked at the Bank’s offices in Hong Kong and Singapore before settling in the New York office in 1997 to work in the telecommunications group, media and technology as an investment banker. Later he joined the Bank’s main investment division, where a name was made when persuading the owner of the Yankees, George Steinbrenner, to launch the regional sports chain Yes in 2001. The project was completed on the day before September 11, and Goldman Sachs ended up supporting the agreement with a private capital investment of 335 million dollars after another investor.
Although risky, the agreement became a great success and Goldman appointed Cardinale Socio in 2004. A few years later, in 2008, he convinced the billionaire owner of the Dallas Cowboys, Jerry Jones, so that it would be associated with Steinbrenner to create the concessions business of Legends Hospitality sports stadiums, of which the investment firm Sixth Street Partners acquired a majority participation in 2021.
Cardinale left Goldman in 2013 and worked briefly at the BDT Commercial Bank, founded by her Goldman colleague, Byron Trott, with whom she had already had deals. (BDT subsequently merged with the investment firm of billionaire Michael Dell to become BDT & MSD, and the firm advised the former director of Paramount, Shari Redstone). Cardinale founded Redbird in 2014 and raised $ 665 million for an inaugural high -patrimony investors that she met in Goldman (whose identities have not been revealed) and a main investment of the Pension Plan of Teachers of Ontario, with which she also had a pre -existing relationship.
Redbird became Skydance’s second largest investor in 2020, leading a capital collection of 275 million dollars. He supported Skydance again in 2022, when he raised another 400 million dollars, with an assessment of 4,000 million dollars. The disbursement of 1800 million dollars of Redbird to buy Paramount represents 15 % of its total assets under management.
The possible rewards for investing in Paramount are large, but so are the risks: among the inexorable decline of linear television, competition between streaming platforms, an existing long -term debt load of 14.2 billion dollars and the possible reaction of the spectators to the perceived capitulation before Trump, Paramount faces a series of challenges under their new group of owners.
“It has the potential to overflow the Redbird portfolio,” said Paul Wachter, founder of Main Street Advisors, earlier this year in a case study on Redbird published in Harvard Business Review . “Restructure Paramount will mean a huge effort.” (Wachter also said that he believes that the investment will be a success “because executives are intelligent and very motivated”).
From the perspective of Cardinale, the new Paramount – with its more than 1200 cinematographic titles, distribution rights for another 2400 films and a list of television chains recorded in the mind of the American spectator – is the perfect candidate to receive Redbird’s treatment. “In Redbird, we look for ways to monetize first level intellectual property. This is a business more than 100 years old … with intellectual property of very high quality,” said Matthew Belloni, founder of Puck after the announcement of the agreement between Skydance and Paramount. “We are not just investors who seek to close a deal; we are not just private capital investors who seek to buy something.”
While investors observe the figures, the critics of the media and consumers will be aware of how Skydance complies with what the FCC described as its “written commitments to ensure that the programming of the new company incorporates a diversity of views of the entire political and ideological spectrum” and to “adopt measures that may eradicate the bias that has undermined confidence in the national media”. There are reasons to believe that the new Paramount will be less Trumpist than some fear: David Ellison donated about one million dollars to the re -election campaign of Joe Biden, and Cardinale, although he is not a megadonant, he has previously donated both Democrats and Republicans.
In any case, Cardinale has more to worry about politics. With its enormous debt and facing structural difficulties, the renewed Paramount needs a financier who understands the industry and is willing to bet his reputation for it. The test begins when the agreement is closed, which could happen at any time.
This article was originally published by Forbes Us.
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