>>516679483
can someone tell me what this guy beard looks like.
shit.

Ellison sells “Day One” as a rebirth. It’s not.

It’s liquidation in nostalgia wrap — turning Paramount from a cultural architect into a refinery for old symbols. Nothing new is being built; the job is to run the stockpile through the machine until only monetized residue remains.

This is late-imperial America in miniature. Once, these institutions made cultural weather. Now they just extract and repackage the remnants. In the late-credit cycle, “value” means extraction.

Tech talk is the tell: “AI-assisted localization,” “virtual production,” “unified tech stack.” Framed as “empowering creativity,” but really clearance to speed the hollowing. Unlike Bezos’s early Amazon, which tolerated inefficiency to grow, Paramount is tightening from the start — locking in the creative vacuum and scaling it with AI.

“Owner-operator culture” doesn’t change the outcome. Closed-loop value chains feed on themselves; no incentive exists to create outside the operation. Consolidation greases the rails for faster hollowing while confirming Paramount is already a dead creative space.

Pluto TV as “top of funnel” = pipeline control, not growth. Sports rights aren’t cultural vitality — they’re the last predictable audience hedge after scripted content was left to rot.

The buzzwords — north star, empower, engine, growth — are a perception loop, not strategy. They summon the same safe reaction every time, mirroring the operational model: safe inputs, predictable outputs, no novelty, no new symbolic ground.

Bottom line: not reinvention, but the final optimization before cultural insolvency. Paramount’s new business is managing the slow, efficient funeral of its own relevance.