Ynon Kreiz–A Former IDF Soldier–Becomes Co-CEO of Paramount-Skydance-Warner Bros.-Discovery; Get Ready For An Awkward Media Landscape

There must be better words to use, but “awkward” came to mind first.

Awkward mainly because you have to live in an intellectual environment where you watch how you observe things, where context matters only when it is favorable for a particular minority, word-choice matters only when it is favorable to the same minority, and more importantly one particular narrative matters more than all others. Oh, and one more thing! There will always be a giant elephant in the room—and I’m not talking about the elephant-sized debt that the newly formed corporation will be carrying on its back.

Let’s turn our attention back to Mr. Ynon Kreiz. If you missed the recent news, he is the newly minted (and probably hand-picked by Larry Ellison) co-CEO of Skydance Corporation, the parent company of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery.

When you visit his Wikipedia page, you can do a keyword search for “Israel” and find it sprinkled throughout—the fact that he was born in Tel Aviv or that he attended Tel Aviv University or that he is today an Israeli-American businessman. I’m confused—is that because he holds American citizenship?

Regardless, despite all the Israel mentions, it doesn’t mention the years he spent as an IDF soldier in his youth as part of the colony’s mandatory military service. We’re assuming this was between the years 1983–1985, since he graduated college in 1991.

This is the current state of American media—an IDF soldier will lead one of the most important media companies not only in the nation, but in the entire world. It is estimated that the combined company of Paramount and WBD will be responsible for ~14–16% of global content spend (approx. $20B)—if not more! It will be very interesting to see the stories that get green-lit for production. I want to speculate really badly, but I’ll let the future productions speak for themselves.

The only positive development about this merger is the fact that this combined company will carry approximately $80 billion in debt with an estimated interest burden of around $6 billion a year. Let’s hope this dark period in American media gets crushed by this debt sooner than later.

Until this happens, please subscribe to Netflix, as they appear to be the only streaming service that wants to remain neutral—assuming there’s such a thing in this political climate.