Latest / Best of Business / Sam Dickie: Fisher Funds expert on the new media moguls looking to buy TikTok

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Sam Dickie: Fisher Funds expert on the new media moguls looking to buy TikTok · Best of Business

• 0:09
  Speaker 1: You're listening to a podcast from News Talk sed B.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: Follow this and our wide range of podcasts now on iHeartRadio.
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  Speaker 2: We might be seeing the emergence of a new Murdoch
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  Speaker 2: type media mogul family. The names you need to know
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  Speaker 2: are Larry Allison of Oracle fame and his son David.
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  Speaker 2: They're orchestrating a huge media consolidation controlling everything from paramount
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  Speaker 2: cn CNN now TikTok. Sam Dickey from Fisher Funds is
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  Speaker 2: with us on this, Sam good eating here. So what
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  Speaker 2: are they up to?
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  Speaker 3: Well, Larry certainly isn't slowing the out of DAYGE eighty one,
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  Speaker 3: so him and a son, David, are attempting to bring
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  Speaker 3: a bring together three things, so massive AI compute power
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  Speaker 3: via Larry's Larry's Oracle, cloud content via the as you said,
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  Speaker 3: David skydoarance paramount, and potential social distribution via owning the
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  Speaker 3: USR of TikTok so first on the cloud compute side,
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  Speaker 3: which will be key in modern media to enable AI
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  Speaker 3: driven content creation and train recommendation engines. Oracle has kind
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  Speaker 3: of always been that the poor fourth cousin behind Amazon,
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  Speaker 3: Microsoft and Google, but he didn't eye popping deal recently
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  Speaker 3: with open Ai. You might have seen it, which saw
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  Speaker 3: Oracle stock prize shoot up about thirty percent in one day,
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  Speaker 3: So that the guts of the deal was Ai signed
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  Speaker 3: a contract to pay Oracle three hundred billion dollars over
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  Speaker 3: five years to train and inference its AI models. And
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  Speaker 3: as an aside here that let's not forget open Ai
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  Speaker 3: only has fifteen billion dollars in revenue in total today
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  Speaker 3: and again it's signed up to pay just one of
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  Speaker 3: its suppliers, Oracle, three hundred billion dollars. But let's ignore
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  Speaker 3: how frothy that is for a minute. And second, on
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  Speaker 3: the content side, they control Paramount, sky Dance and a
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  Speaker 3: rumored to be making a bid for Warner Brothers, so
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  Speaker 3: if all that comes together, they will control HBO, Paramount CBSCNN, Showtime,
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  Speaker 3: and two of the five classic old school movie studios.
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  Speaker 3: And finally, on the New World distribution side, Oracle is
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  Speaker 3: leading a consort, he consortium to buy eighty percent of
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  Speaker 3: tiktoks Us operations for what is pretty much a sweetheart
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  Speaker 3: deal of fourteen billion dollars, so one heck of a footprint.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, do you think they can pull this off?
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  Speaker 3: They are in the box seat, So there's a few
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  Speaker 3: pretty obvious things there. So it doesn't hurt that Larry
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  Speaker 3: flirted with being the richest man on the planet briefly
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  Speaker 3: a couple of weeks ago after that blowout deal with
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  Speaker 3: open Ai was announced. And he is exceptionally tight with
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  Speaker 3: President Trump. So he's headlining the project Stargate that you
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  Speaker 3: and I talked about earlier in the year head which
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  Speaker 3: is a half a trillion dollar public private USAI infrastructure project.
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  Speaker 3: So and then of course he has a majority ownership
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  Speaker 3: in Oracle and in Paramount sky Dance pluses clout and connections,
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  Speaker 3: placements the front runner to own TikTok. So I think
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  Speaker 3: they're in good shape.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, Now is this what we want though? I mean,
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  Speaker 2: do we want to see this kind of media consolidation?
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  Speaker 2: What does it mean for investors?
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  Speaker 3: Well, I think ethically and from a democracy point of view,
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  Speaker 3: there's obviously a lot of questions from a market point
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  Speaker 3: of view. Like you said that, this very broad media
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  Speaker 3: consolidation play is probably the most far reaching in a
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  Speaker 3: long time. And the only deal in the last thirty
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  Speaker 3: years that was this ambitious was the infamous Aol Time
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  Speaker 3: Warner deal in the year two thousand, just before the
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  Speaker 3: dot com bust, So like this one, it was an
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  Speaker 3: attempt to remember that word convergence we used to talk
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  Speaker 3: about back in the day. It was an attempt to
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  Speaker 3: merge new age distribution via America Online AOL, being a
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  Speaker 3: dominant Internet service provider ISP is a blast from the
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  Speaker 3: pass at the time with content. But that one hundred
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  Speaker 3: and eighty billion dollars deal failed spectacularly and destroyed a
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  Speaker 3: ton of capital. So the current deal is as ambitious
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  Speaker 3: and far reaching and has some of those frothy signs
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  Speaker 3: of that one in two thousand, like the Oracle Open
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  Speaker 3: Ai deal today. However, if it does go ahead and
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  Speaker 3: as successful, if linear TV wasn't dead already, it probably
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  Speaker 3: will be. So this behemoth would control roughly half the
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  Speaker 3: cable TV market in the US, and even streaming platforms
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  Speaker 3: like Disney Plus and Netflix might come under pressure if
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  Speaker 3: you and I start to watch all of our favorite
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  Speaker 3: favorite friends episodes and movies and CNN news directly on
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  Speaker 3: our TikTok apps. Imagine that, but it might even pressure
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  Speaker 3: bohemos like Meta is uncertainty over the future of TikTok,
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  Speaker 3: and the US had definitely temporarily shifted advertiser spend to meta,
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  Speaker 3: so it really is fascinating stuff. So we need to
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  Speaker 3: watch this space.
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  Speaker 2: That really is quite interesting, Sam, Thanks so much, Sam Dickey,
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  Speaker 2: Officier Funds.
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