David Ellison now heads Skydance after the $110 billion Warner Bros. Discovery takeover closed.
Forbes puts his net worth above $1 billion but credits the fortune to his father, Larry Ellison.
He is therefore listed under "Larry & family" and will not appear separately on the list.
David Ellison now steers one of Hollywood's biggest media groups, yet Forbes says he is unlikely to feature on its World's Billionaires list for a long time.
Skydance's merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, valued at $110 billion, was sealed on Tuesday. Ellison, as chief executive, will oversee CBS, Paramount Pictures, HBO, CNN and the Warner Bros. studio under a single banner called Skydance. He becomes the face of a conglomerate spanning news, film and television.
1 October 2026
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Ellison gets $150 million in cash and restricted stock for pulling the deal off. Few salaried professionals would call that small, but next to his family's wealth it is. His father, Larry Ellison, co-founded Oracle and, Forbes says, ranks as the eighth-wealthiest person on the planet at roughly $185 billion.
Forbes values David at over $1 billion, adding up the deal payout, his Paramount holding and a number of residences. Most of that, it points out, flows from his father.
Control Is David's, Capital Is Larry's
Larry funded the launch of Skydance, wrote a large equity cheque when it bought Paramount, and stood behind more than $45 billion of the latest financing as personal guarantor. The family commands 77.5% of the votes in the enlarged company, and nearly all of those sit with David. The money underpinning that power, however, is almost entirely Larry's.
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That split is why Forbes keeps the two together. Its rule is to attribute a fortune to the person who built it, no matter how much has been transferred to relatives, particularly when the transfers are structured in layers that are hard to see through. David therefore appears within the entry titled "Larry & family".
Born in 1983, David grew up alongside his sister Megan, primarily in the care of their mother, Barbara Boothe, who was Larry's third wife out of six. Vanity Fair has reported that Larry privately admits to friends that he was largely absent in those years, absorbed in making Oracle a database software heavyweight.
