David Ellison Net Worth 2026: $1B+ Fortune, Explained

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David Ellison's net worth is estimated at $1B+ (over $1 billion) in 2026 — but you will not find him on the Forbes World's Billionaires list. Forbes credits his fortune — a $150 million payout from the Warner Bros. Discovery takeover, his Paramount stock, and several residences — to the fortune of his father, Larry Ellison, so David sits inside the entry titled "Larry & family". The distinction matters: David controls the empire; Larry's money built it.

Three days before this article's publication, on October 6, 2026, Ellison closed the $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, folding CBS, Paramount Pictures, HBO, CNN, and the Warner Bros. studio into one company renamed simply Skydance. He is 43, the son of Oracle's co-founder, and now the chairman and CEO of the most consequential media consolidation in a generation.

The $1B+ breakdown: where his money sits

Forbes' estimate of David's personal fortune is built from three visible pieces — and one big caveat. The visible pieces add up to more than $1 billion; the caveat is that nearly every dollar traces back to his father. The single biggest confirmed payout is the $150 million in cash and restricted stock he collected for closing the Warner Bros. Discovery deal, reported by Outlook Business and TheWrap.

The two family-trust lines deserve context. When Oracle went public in 1986, Larry set aside 90,000 shares for three-year-old David (and the same for newborn Megan). After splits that stake would be worth billions, but by 2012 it had shrunk below a million shares — Forbes reckons the gradual sales, taxed and conservatively invested, are worth around $300 million today. The siblings also held stakes in NetSuite, a Larry-backed software firm; when Oracle bought it in 2016, David's trust collected roughly $370 million before taxes, which Forbes estimates at about $500 million today.

Why he's not on the Forbes list

This is the strangest line in the whole story: a man worth over a billion dollars, running a $110 billion empire, who does not appear on the World's Billionaires list. Forbes' rule is to attribute a fortune to the person who built it, no matter how much has been transferred to relatives — especially when the transfers run through layers that are hard to see through. Larry built the Oracle fortune; David absorbed pieces of it his whole life. So the entry reads "Larry & family", and David's $1B+ is folded inside.

Outlook Business put the mechanics bluntly: Larry funded the launch of Skydance, wrote a huge equity check for the Paramount buy, and personally guaranteed more than $45 billion of the latest deal's financing. "Control is David's, capital is Larry's." That is why the same publication that values David above $1 billion also says he is unlikely to feature on the billionaires list for a long time.

The practical upshot for anyone searching "David Ellison net worth": treat the number as real and the ranking as inherited. He is a billionaire by any practical measure — just not a self-made one, and not a separately ranked one.

The $110B Warner Bros. Discovery takeover

The deal that made Ellison the face of Hollywood closed on October 6, 2026, capping nearly a year of bruising negotiation. Warner Bros. had initially agreed to sell itself to Netflix in December 2025; Ellison launched a hostile bid, kept raising his price, and Netflix walked away in February 2026. The final terms: $31 per share in cash, valuing the equity at $81 billion and the enterprise at about $110 billion including assumed debt.

The path was anything but smooth. Twelve state attorneys general plus the Writers Guild sued in July 2026 to block the combination on antitrust grounds; a settlement was reached in late September and approved by a federal judge on September 30, 2026, with conditions including a commitment to protect CNN's editorial independence. Days later the deal closed, the combined company was renamed Skydance, and its shares began trading on the NYSE under the ticker SKYD.

Ellison split the top job: he stays chairman and CEO in charge of strategy, creative direction, technology, and capital allocation, while former Mattel chief Ynon Kreiz joined as co-CEO on October 5, 2026, to run day-to-day operations and the integration. The company inherits more than $80 billion in combined debt and has committed to finding $6 billion in cost savings within three years — the math that will define Ellison's tenure. Read what companies Ellison now owns for the full asset map.

Paramount first: the $8B warm-up act

The Warner deal was actually Ellison's second studio conquest. In 2024 he shocked the industry by winning the race to buy Paramount Global from Shari Redstone for $8 billion — roughly $6 billion of it supplied directly by his father, with RedBird Capital covering the rest. That deal closed on August 7, 2025, forming Paramount Skydance with Ellison as chairman and CEO.

Paramount was the proof of concept: a legacy studio bought with family capital, then immediately aimed at a bigger target. It also established the pattern that defines every Ellison transaction — David negotiates, Larry underwrites. The Warner bid, at nearly fourteen times the Paramount price, was the same playbook at an entirely different scale. For the pay structure behind it all, see David Ellison's salary and compensation.

The family money machine

To understand David's $1B+, you have to understand the machine that manufactured it. It started in 1986, when Larry set aside those 90,000 Oracle shares for a toddler. It continued through the NetSuite windfall. And it now operates at industrial scale: the family commands 77.5% of the votes in the enlarged Skydance, with nearly all of those votes sitting with David — while the capital behind that control is, in Outlook Business' phrase, almost entirely Larry's.

The guarantees are the tell. Larry personally guaranteed more than $45 billion of the Warner financing — over 40% of the $110 billion deal. Sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE reportedly participated as well, but the Ellison family trust is the spine of the transaction. Forbes' methodology simply follows the money: when the founder of a fortune is alive and still deploying it, the fortune stays his, however many children are holding pieces.

None of this means David is a passenger. He founded Skydance Media in 2006, produced a genuine blockbuster run — five Mission: Impossible films, two Star Treks, and Top Gun: Maverick, which grossed $1.5 billion and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Picture — and personally drove both megadeals. The full origin story is in how David Ellison made his money.

Ellison vs. Ellison: the $185B father and the $1B+ son

Here is the disambiguation the internet badly needs. Larry Ellison, Oracle's co-founder, is worth roughly $185 billion and ranks as the world's eighth-richest person (Forbes, October 2026). David Ellison is worth over $1 billion — about half of one percent of his father's fortune. When headlines say "billionaire Ellison buys Warner Bros.", the billionaire doing the buying is David; the billions doing the paying are Larry's.

David was born on January 9, 1983, in Santa Clara County, California, to Larry and his third wife, Barbara Boothe, and is now 43. He married actress and singer Sandra Lynn Modic on October 1, 2011, in Palm Springs; they have two children. His sister Megan Ellison runs Annapurna Pictures, the indie studio behind Zero Dark Thirty and American Hustle. One family, three Hollywood fortunes — all flowing from the same Oracle source.

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