Ellison, a film producer and the founder of Skydance, is rapidly becoming a household name amid intense media coverage of the biggest deal in entertainment and media this year. His father and partner in the deal, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, has long been famous as one of the richest men in the world. Less well known, however, is the other guy behind the deal: Gerry Cardinale of the private equity firm RedBird Capital. 

With RedBird’s $2 billion stake in Skydance’s $8 billion acquisition of Paramount Global, Cardinale has been a key player in the 19 months of machinations ahead of the transfer of power from Shari Redstone to the Ellisons.

Ahead of the closing of the deal, Paramount was already showing signs of private equity-style fiscal austerity. Under Redstone, the company pushed through sweeping layoffs and parted ways with multiple top-paid executives—and Ellison has promised to find another $2 billion in cost savings.

Paramount also cut loose The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and settled a $16 million lawsuit brought by President Donald Trump over a 60 Minutes interview. After Skydance agreed to “ensure that the new company’s programming embodies a diversity of viewpoints from across the political and ideological spectrum,” and to “root out the bias that has undermined trust in the national news media,” Trump-appointed FCC Chairman Brendan Carr approved the deal on July 24. The moves garnered criticism from those who saw the Trump settlement as an indirect bribe and the cancellation of Colbert, a frequent critic of Trump, as an effort to curry favor with the president. 

Now, with the deal done, Cardinale’s influence is clearly delineated: RedBird holds 22.5% of Paramount’s voting rights while David Ellison will hold 50% of voting rights and his father will hold the remaining 27.5%. Several alums of the firm are in the C-suite: Running the company alongside Ellison are two Cardinale lieutenants—Jeff Shell as President and Andy Gordon as COO. Cardinale did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

An “IP monetization engine” comes to Hollywood

Cardinale’s rise to Hollywood kingmaker marks a watershed moment for the entertainment industry. Private equity firms have been making moves in Hollywood for some time, but Redbird’s stake in the Paramount deal is by far the largest to date.

Unlike the moguls, creatives, and dynasties who traditionally ruled the studios, Cardinale is an outsider—a product of Wall Street, not Paramount’s backlot culture. But it’s a trait he sees as an asset. “I really think being from outside that ecosystem—or at least one foot in, one foot out—is a huge competitive advantage,” he told Fortune’s Paolo Confino in 2024. “I don’t get caught up in the headlines. I don’t get caught up in the emotionalism. I’m not running to go to the Oscars.”

Cardinale—a former Rhodes scholar and the kind of finance wonk who uses terms like “technological disintermediation”—suggests that it will take real discipline to position the iconic but battered studio for tech-forward survival in a ruthless streaming era.

This same unforgiving strategic discipline made RedBird formidable in sports and entertainment. “We’re an IP monetization engine,” Cardinale told Fortune last year. “That’s what we do.” At Paramount, it will likely mean leveraging the legendary Hollywood studio’s trove of movies, shows, and other IP, while cutting costs and improving efficiency. “We should be able to make movies for half the cost,” Cardinale told Puck. “We should be able to make original content for half the cost.”

While Paramount is Cardinale’s highest-profile investment, it’s by no means the dealmaker’s public debut. The 58-year-old investor has been betting big for nearly three decades, having cut his teeth at Goldman Sachs before founding RedBird (a play on his last name) in 2014. The firm now has $12 billion in assets under management and six global offices. Despite having built a multibillion-dollar private equity empire, Cardinale previously told Fortune he rejects the term “mogul,” describing himself simply as an investor. 

The finance world wasn’t always appealing to Cardinale, he told Bloomberg’s The Deal in 2024:  “I wasn’t one of these Wharton kids who knew I wanted to go to Wall Street from day one,” he said. Cardinale grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs and attended Harvard University, where he rowed heavyweight crew and graduated magna cum laude before studying politics and political theory at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. It was while working at a Tokyo think tank that Cardinale began considering a career in finance, joining Goldman as an analyst in 1992 at the firm’s Hong Kong and Singapore offices, and later moving to New York.

In 2001, Cardinale helped persuade Yankees owner George Steinbrenner to launch the YES regional sports network, with Goldman sinking a $335 million private equity investment into the project. Cardinale saw the opportunity for the Yankees to monetize their own content—games, analysis, and original programming—rather than simply selling broadcast rights to local cable. The risky YES deal netted hundreds of millions in annual cash flow and fast-tracked Cardinale’s promotion to partner at Goldman in 2004. Eight years later, Goldman and Providence Equity sold a 49% stake in YES to News Corp at a valuation exceeding $3 billion—up from a starting valuation around $850 million in 2001.

Cardinale’s success with the Yankees helped prove what was to become a foundational thesis for his investment strategy empire: While platforms, formats, and technologies shift, the audience attachment to compelling IP (a storied sports team, a blockbuster movie franchise, a beloved character) persists. This durability enables monetization through endless new business models as the landscape evolves.

“I’m able to look at the sports industry, and the media and entertainment industry, as ecosystems,” Cardinale explained to Fortune in 2024, speaking of his ownership of the Italian soccer team AC Milan and his efforts to replace the team’s crumbling century-old stadium with a brand-new Yankee Stadium-like arena. “And then what I do is I look for dislocations. I look for areas where there’s a need for improvement, evolution, and professionalization.”

Cardinale left Goldman in 2013 and founded RedBird the following year with $665 million he raised for an inaugural fund. Cardinale’s strategy at RedBird has consistently followed his formula: Acquire premium intellectual property, streamline costs, then monetize it.

This priority is reflected in the firm’s portfolio. As well as AC Milan, with its millions of global fans, Redbird purchased an 11% stake in Fenway Sports Group, the holding company that owns the Boston Red Sox, English soccer team Liverpool FC, and the regional sports channel New England Sports Network. Then, with the help of FSG, RedBird invested in NBA star LeBron James’s entertainment company SpringHill, in a $725 million deal.

Outside of sports, RedBird backed Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s film production company, Artists Equity, and acquired the production company behind the critically acclaimed British television show Fleabag and the reality game show Squid Game: The Challenge. In 2024, the firm entered the news game, agreeing to purchase the U.K. publications the Telegraph and the Spectator alongside co-investors from the United Arab Emirates, in a deal shepherded by former CNN head Jeff Zucker. Despite objections from some in the UK government about foreign influence over institutions of British media, in May, the Telegraph acquisition went through in a deal valued at upwards of $640 million. 

Cardinale has also long backed David Ellison’s vision for Skydance. In 2020, RedBird became the second largest investor in Ellison’s company, leading a $275 million capital raise. Cardinale helped raise an additional $400 million for Skydance in 2022. 

For Cardinale, content is king

Cardinale’s friend Bob Iger, the Disney CEO, sees Cardinale as a natural when it comes to the business of culture. “He gets the fact that great IP is the equivalent of beachfront property,” Iger told Fortune last year. “He knows that the world is in need of entertainment, and regardless of the means in which they get it, or how it’s monetized, there’s real value to it, and it’s long-term.” 

So far, this ethos has paid off for Cardinale. But the road ahead for Paramount is full of formidable challenges: a declining linear TV sector, billions in debt, brutal streaming wars, and a workforce still reeling from multiple layoffs—and likely more to come with the additional $2 billion in cuts pledged by Ellison. The new leadership’s promise of “transformation” now rests on whether they can drive efficiency without eviscerating the creative core.

To do so, Paramount, a Skydance Corporation, will likely bank on Cardinale’s IP-optimizing strategy. In Cardinale’s model, every acquisition is meant to outlast market cycles and fads, thriving on operational rigor and adaptable “platform value” that eclipses the old trophy asset mentality.

And Paramount, with its more than 100 years of lore, upwards of 1,200 film titles, and the distribution rights to thousands of other films, is chock full of platform value.