Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Friday, March 6th.

Today on Forbes, what the Paramount Warner Brothers merger means for Larry Ellison's fortune.

If regulators clear it, one of the largest mergers in history will hand billionaire Larry

Ellison and his son David, unprecedented sway over American media.

CBS and CNN under one roof, HBO Max and Paramount Plus fused, Warner Brothers and Paramount

Pictures sharing a parent. That's on top of the tech and real estate empire, the Elder Ellison,

Oracle's chief technology officer,

President Donald Trump's new neighbor, and the world's sixth richest person, already controls.

Last August, the Ellison's took control of Paramount in an $8 billion merger with Skydance,

the entertainment company run by David and owned mostly by Larry.

Weeks later, Paramount Skydance lobbed a hostile $111 billion bid for Warner Brothers

discovery, which had already agreed to sell itself to Netflix.

Netflix declined to counter.

Warner's board deemed Paramount's offer superior.

The Ellison-controlled entity is now in pole position to buy a company with a roughly $70 billion market cap for a triple-digit

billion dollar price. Here's the problem. Paramount has just $3 billion in cash on its balance sheet.

To bridge the gap, three big banks are committing $57.5 billion in debt. Most of the rest, a $45.7 billion equity commitment is coming

from Larry Ellison's trust. And that's where the math starts to get tight.

Ellison has only sold $4.7 billion of Oracle stock pre-tax this century.

By Forbes estimates, he has less than $10 billion of cash in the bank,

mostly from Oracle dividends.

He also owns an estimated $15 billion in Tesla shares amassed during his tenure as a Tesla director,

...