Mark Ruffalo Slams Ellisons’ Ties To Oracle Amid Paramount-WBD Merger
As Mayor Karen Bass shows her support for the Paramount-Warner Bros merger, Mark Ruffalo is continuing to fight the acquisition.
On Friday, the 4x Oscar nominee called out the Ellisons ties to Oracle, sharing a video of the tech company’s executive vice chair Safra Catz discussing how they made some “really profoundly scary technology” available to the Israeli military amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict.
“This is the company that Larry Ellison is using to fund his son David’s Warner Bros acquisition,” wrote Ruffalo with the clip on his Instagram Story. “These ‘really profoundly scary technologies’ will most likely be merged into one of the largest media conglomerates in the world and one day used on you. Look how she revels in what we now have come to see as a genocide, which was built on an apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle.”
“There is an old saying. ‘The way you do one thing is the way you do everything.’ From one of the biggest tech companies in the world. Powering some of the most destructive and inhuman forces in the world. Why has Trump pushed this illegal merger through? Larry Ellison will own most of ‘Para Bros’. Larry is a classic Oligarch. They are crushing workers and consolidating the wealth of the world for their own power and concentrated dominance,” he continued.
Ruffalo wrote, “We have a chance to stop this. There are 12 state Attorneys General suing to block this merger. It will be catastrophic for our film industry. There will be a loss of 4500 direct filmmaking jobs and the loss of another 10k ancillary jobs. Mergers like this are almost always bad for workers, consumers, and the industry they tend to dominate. It’s a classic antitrust case. It will hike up the cost of cable and flatten out competition. This means less choice for our audiences. It also concentrates an enormous amount of creative control to companies that say and do things like this strange woman from Oracle. Really profoundly scary people.”
The MCU star’s comments come after Bass called for “all parties to come to the table” and push the merger through during a press conference on Thursday.
In February, Netflix threw in the towel on the Warner Bros. deal, refusing to raise its bid against Paramount Skydance’s “superior” $31-per-share offer, following the $82.7 billion deal Netflix signed with WBD in December before the Ellison-owned company launched its hostile takeover.
Ruffalo teamed up with attorney Norm Eisen in April to urge state officials to enact antitrust laws and block the hostile takeover, accumulating more than 5,000 signatures on an open letter claiming the merger will “threaten the sustainability of the entire creative community.” The letter was organized by the Committee for the First Amendment, the Future Film Coalition, the Writers Guild of America and the Democracy Defenders Fund.
