Paramount Skydance scrambled to respond after Hollywood actor Mark Ruffalo attacked the studio’s CEO and his father.
According to a Friday article by Variety, Ruffalo posted a video on his Instagram showing the executive vice chair of the tech company Oracle, Safra Catz, talking about how the company supported Israel after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. Oracle was co-founded and is chaired by Larry Ellison, the father of Paramount CEO David Ellison.
Catz, who is Israeli, is shown in the video speaking on a panel a few years ago, according to Variety. Catz is also on Paramount’s board of directors, per the company’s website.
“There’s a few things that we did that I really can’t talk about to advance the agenda for the Israeli military,” Catz said. “But we have some really profoundly scary technology at Oracle, and we wanted to make sure that it was available for the effort.”
Ruffalo followed that with a post where he warned about Oracle and Paramount’s merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice greenlit the merger earlier this year, but a judge has halted it after a lawsuit by a dozen state attorneys general.
“Trump pushed this illegal merger through,” Ruffalo said in his Instagram story. Ruffalo described Oracle as “the company that Larry Ellison is using to fund his son David’s Warner Bros acquisition.”
Ruffalo also cautioned that Oracle’s “really scary technologies” brought up in Catz’s comments “will most likely be merged into one of the largest media conglomerates in the world and one day used on you.”
He also called Larry Ellison “a classic Oligarch,” and said, along with Catz, they’re “really profoundly Scary people.”
Paramount responded with a lengthy statement, which CNN chief media analyst Brian Stelter shared in a post on X. “This brings us to a moment to lower the temperature, not raise it,” Paramount wrote.
Paramount dismissed Ruffalo’s comments as “antisemitic tropes” that are “a bridge too far.”
Addressing the merger, Paramount wrote, “We understand people feel strongly about this merger and are hopeful and expect that it will be judged based on the legal merits, not underlying bias.”
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