Don’t Trust People Who Talk Like This

A few days ago, David Ellison took control of Warner Bros for $111 billion—and is now merging it into Paramount (which he acquired back in 2024). But he needed some help from Dad to make this happen. Tech titan Larry Ellison gave personal guarantees to the tune of $40 billion in order to seal the deal.

As a result, this son of a Silicon Valley CEO is now the most powerful person in Hollywood. So I watched with interest when David Ellison appeared on CNBC to talk about his plans for the future.

I’m still in a state of shock—because he speaks a language that, a few years ago, nobody in the creative community would even have understood.

You might think that Ellison would talk about making great movies or bringing audiences back to theaters—or, at a minimum, creating entertainment for the masses, if not something more artistic.

But that’s not what he has in mind.

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Instead Ellison boasts: “We are positioned to win in every single vertical that we operate in….We have the greatest content engine with marquee intellectual properties. You’re immediately getting to scale in streaming” he adds; and then there’s his “incredibly profitable linear portfolio.”

Of course, it wasn’t easy to get to this point. Ellison recalled his previous visit to CNBC. “We launched the hostile on your show,” he tells the host, “so coming full circle today is quite remarkable.”

Have people in the creative world ever talked like this? Did Picasso win in every vertical? Did Shakespeare brag about his “content engine”? Did Beethoven ever achieve a “profitable linear portfolio”?

But those saps were losers by today’s standards. Maybe they should have launched a hostile, instead of wasting so much time on their craft.

I still remember the first time I heard someone describe different vocations and livelihoods as verticals. That was right before the dotcom bubble burst, and I’d been called in to help a web business that, a few weeks later, went broke. The people who spoke in such a cavalier way were soon unemployed.

I felt sorry for them. But I viewed that obfuscating way of speech as a contributor to the problems that brought them down. I still feel that way. I just can’t trust people who talk like this. It’s like they just took a Voight-Kampff test, and failed miserably. I fear I’m talking to replicants, not human beings.

Judging by the news stories out of Hollywood, there are a lot of replicants in the film business nowadays.

On the other hand, I’ve talked to hundreds (or maybe thousands) of artistic people over the years. Against long odds, they somehow manage to make a living in creative pursuits. That is their vertical, so to speak. Sometimes they don’t even want to talk about how creativity happens—it seems almost magical, and the process is very fragile, even for the greatest artists.

Just talking about it puts it at risk. You got blessed with a gift—maybe a hit song, or an inspired poem, or something else of that sort—and if you deal it with too glibly, it might never come back. So it’s best not to boast or strut, and instead just focus on your craft.

“Did Picasso win in every vertical? Did Shakespeare brag about his ‘content engine’? Did Beethoven ever achieve a ‘profitable linear portfolio’?”

But when people like this do speak about creativity, they treat it with reverence.

Shakespeare called the creative process a “fine frenzy.” Plato described it as a “form of possession or madness.” But the most common way of explaining this inspiration, over the centuries, has been to assign credit to a divine woman known as the Muse.

• More than 2,500 years ago, Hesiod helped invent Western poetry, and he happily told people how it happened. Goddesses appeared to him and, in his own words, “they taught Hesiod glorious song while he was shepherding his lambs.”
• The first poet in English, Cædmon, had a similar experience. He was illiterate, but he had a visitation during a dream—and was thus able to create “poetical expressions of much sweetness and humility.”
• Even in modern times, poet Robert Graves continued to insist that the Muse was real, and he had firsthand experience of her existence.

I could give many other examples, and I have devoted a lot of effort to studying this magical process. I’ve learned, along the way, that a surprising number of hit songs were composed during dreams—just like Cædmon’s. Not long ago, I thought Robert Graves was crazy for talking about the Muses as if they were real, but I don’t mock him anymore.

That world of magic and inspiration is under attack now, assaulted by the over-rationalization of the overseers. So you will look in vain for an entertainment industry CEO who embraces the “sweetness and humility” that actually define the creative process.

But I can’t just blame David Ellison, because he’s not alone. Business and finance jargon is now the only language spoken among the people who make the final decisions on almost every aesthetic or artistic matter.

So when the head of Warner Bros music gets asked about AI, he describes it as “an incredible value creation opportunity.” Say what? But at least that’s better than the CEO who praised AI’s ability to “eliminate lower-value human capital.”

The brutal reality is that we have reached the stage where artistry can be discussed without any consideration of the artist—who is now an inconvenience in the value chain.

And that value chain is all that matters anymore.

Barbara Broccoli, whose family long controlled the James Bond films, was horrified when an Amazon exec described these cherished movies as content. She walked away from the meeting in a huff, griping that “these people are fucking idiots.”

But Broccoli eventually sold out total control to Amazon. The money was too good to turn down. And that was one more victory for tech and web interests in their takeover of the creative world.

I’m not naive. I know that movie studios and record labels have never been perfect. The bosses are often greedy or sometimes outright criminals. But even the gangsters knew that art isn’t content.

There was a day when the mob ran the big music venues. But Al Capone treated the musicians with respect—he knew that they were special people with gifts. They weren’t just a content engine for his linear portfolio (and, in his case, a highly liquid portfolio).

I ran a record label for a short period in my twenties. Dealing with record distributors was a royal pain—it was like negotiating with Tony Soprano. But as hard as it was collecting from those thugs, it was better than dealing with today’s streaming platforms. The old-time power brokers at least understood that artists paid everybody’s bills with their creativity—without them, film studios and record labels and publishing houses don’t exist.

Nowadays the decision-makers have other priorities. They have verticals to dominate. If they could, they would do it with bots instead of artists.

We deserve better stewards for our creative culture.

It’s not clear that we will get them. I’ve predicted that tech will eventually swallow up almost the entire creative economy—and I shudder to see how rapidly that forecast is coming true. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve called for creators and fans to support alternative channels.

We need to create our own parallel ecosystem—and as fast as possible. We’re fortunate that some people and organizations are already working on it.

But we also need to educate the tech people invading our world. My guidance here comes from a simple proverb (from Confucius):

“The beginning of wisdom is calling things by their right names.”

So when the new bosses talk like technocrats, we must remind them, again and again, that artists aren’t content engines. The work of art is not a brand franchise. And the magical source of inspiration can never be reduced to a vertical.

And, hey, if that doesn’t work, we can always try launching a hostile. We may not have deep pockets or billionaire dads. But there are other ways to win a battle. If it comes to that, I wouldn’t bet against the creative folk. Because, let’s face it, they are the value chain.