The power game of $ 2 billion from Redbird Capital: Meet Gerry Cardinale, the King-Fabricant of Investment Capital Behind the Paramount Agreement-Skydance

Ellison, a film producer and founder of Skyance, quickly became a familiar name in the midst of an intense media coverage of the biggest entertainment and media affair this year. His father and partner in the agreement, the co -founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison, has long been famous as one of the richest men in the world. Less known, however, is the other guy behind the agreement: Gerry Cardinale of the Redbird Capital Investment Capital Company.

With the participation of $ 2 billion in Redbird in the acquisition of $ 8 billion in Skydance of Paramount Global, Cardinale was a key player in the 19 months of machinations before the transfer of energy from Shari Redstone to the Ellisons.

Before the conclusion of the agreement, Paramount already showed signs of budgetary austerity in capital-investment style. Under Redstone, the company has passed the layoffs and separate from several highest paid executives – and Ellison promised to find an additional $ 2 billion in cost savings.

Also paramount The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and set a trial of $ 16 million brought by President Donald Trump 60 minutes interview. After Skydance agreed to “ensure that the programming of the new society embodies a diversity of points of view from the whole political and ideological spectrum” and to “reduce the bias which has undermined confidence in the national media”, the president of the FCC brought by Trump, Brendan Carr, approved the agreement on July 24. The movements were brought to those who saw Trump’s frequent critical Tarm, as an effort to create the president’s favor.

Now, with the agreement concluded, Cardinale’s influence is clearly delimited: Redbird holds 22.5% of Paramount’s voting rights while David Ellison will hold 50% of the voting rights and his father will hold the remaining 27.5%. Several alumni of the company are in suite C: Directing the company alongside Ellison are two lieutenants of Cardinale – Jeff Shell as president and Andy Gordon as COO. Cardinale did not respond to requests for comments for this story.

An “IP monetization engine” comes to Hollywood

The ramp -up of Cardinale in Hollywood Kingmaker marks a moment of the watershed for the entertainment industry. Investment capital companies have been making movements in Hollywood for some time, but Redbird’s participation in the paramount agreement is by far the largest to date.

Unlike the magnates, creatives and dynasties that have traditionally ruled studios, Cardinale is a stranger – a Wall Street product, not the culture of Paramount’s backlot. But it is a trait that he considers an asset. “I really think I am from the outside of this ecosystem – or at least one foot, one foot – is a huge competitive advantage,” he said Fortune“S Paolo confined in 2024.” I do not get caught in the headlines. I am not taken in emotionality. I do not run to go to the Oscars. »»

CARDINAL – A former Rhodes scholarship holder and the kind of financing that uses terms such as “technological disintermediation” – suggests that it will take a real discipline to position the emblematic but beaten studio for technological survival in an era of ruthless streaming.

This same ruthless strategic discipline made Redbird formidable in sports and entertainment. “We are an IP monetization engine,” said Cardinale Fortune Last year. “This is what we do.” In Paramount, this will probably mean taking advantage of the draft of films, programs and other IPs of the legendary studio, while reducing costs and improving efficiency. “We should be able to make films for half the cost,” said Cardinale Puck. “We should be able to make original content for half the cost.”

Although Paramount is the deepest cardinal investment, this is by no means the public beginnings of the Dealmaker. The 58 -year -old investor has been betting for almost three decades, after cutting his teeth at Goldman Sachs before founding Redbird (one play on his family name) in 2014. The company now has $ 12 billion in management and six world offices. Although he built an empire of private equity of several billion dollars, Cardinale previously told Fortune He rejects the term “magnate”, simply describing himself as an investor.

The world of finance was not always attractive for Cardinale, he said BloombergThis is the agreement in 2024: “I was not one of those children of Wharton who knew that I wanted to go to Wall Street from the first day,” he said. Cardinale grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and attended Harvard University, where he brought the heavyweight crew and graduated from Magna Cum Laude before studying politics and political theory in Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. It was by working in a reflection group in Tokyo that Cardinale began to consider a career in finance, to join Goldman as an analyst in 1992 in the offices of Hong Kong and Singapore of the company, then moving to New York.

In 2001, Cardinale helped to persuade the owner of the Yankees, George Steinbrenner, to launch the regional sports network Yes, Goldman flowing an investment of $ 335 million in investment capital in the project. Cardinale has seen the opportunity for Yankees to monetize their own content – games, analysis and original programming – rather than simply selling diffusion rights on the local cable. The Risky Yes Agreement made it possible to perceive hundreds of millions of annual cash flows and promotion of accelerated cardinal in Goldman in 2004, eight years later, Goldman and Providence Equity sold a participation of 49% in Yes to News Corp in an evaluation greater than $ 3 billion, coming from an evaluation of around $ 850 million in 2001.

Cardinale’s success with the Yankees helped prove what would become a fundamental thesis for his investment strategy empire: while platforms, formats and technologies change, public attachment to a convincing IP (a legendary sports team, a successful film franchise, a beloved character) persists. This sustainability allows monetization through new endless commercial models as the landscape evolves.

“I am able to look at the sports industry and the media and entertainment industry, as ecosystems,” Cardinale explained to Fortune In 2024, speaking of his property of the Italian football team AC Milan and their efforts to replace the team’s centenary stadium of the team with a brand new Yankee stadium type arena. “And then what I do is that I am looking for dislocations. I am looking for areas where there is a need for improvement, evolution and professionalization. ”

Cardinale left Goldman in 2013 and founded Redbird the following year with $ 665 million he collected for an inaugural fund. Cardinal’s strategy in Redbird has always followed its formula: acquiring premium intellectual property, rationalizing costs, then monetizing it.

This priority is reflected in the company’s portfolio. In addition to AC Milan, with its millions of world fans, Redbird bought 11% in Fenway Sports Group, the Holding company which owns the Boston Red Sox, the English football team Liverpool FC and the Regional Sports Channel New England Network. Then, with the help of FSG, Redbird invested in the star of the NBA LeBron James’s Entertainment Company Springhill, in an agreement of $ 725 million.

Apart from sports, Redbird supported Ben Affleck and the film production company of Matt Damon, Equity Artists, and acquired the production company behind the British television acclaimed by critics Scourge And the reality TV game Cammar game: the challenge. In 2024, the company entered the news game, agreeing to buy British publications the telegraph And The spectator Alongside the co-investors of the United Arab Emirates, in an agreement with the former CNN chief, Jeff Zucker. Despite the objections of certain members of the British government on foreign influence on British media institutions in May, the telegraph The acquisition has concluded an agreement valued at more than $ 640 million.

Cardinale has also long supported David Ellison’s vision for Skydance. In 2020, Redbird became the second largest investor in Ellison, leading an increase of $ 275 million. Cardinale helped collect additional $ 400 million for Skydance in 2022.

For Cardinale, the content is king

Cardinale’s friend, Bob Iger, Disney CEO, considers Cardinale as a naturalness with regard to culture affairs. “He obtains the fact that the large IP is the equivalent of the property by the sea,” said Iger Fortune Last year. “He knows that the world needs entertainment, and whatever the means in which they get it, or how it is monetized, there is real value, and it is in the long term.”

So far, this philosophy has paid cardinal. But the coming road to Paramount is full of formidable challenges: a drop in the linear television sector, billions of debts, brutal streaming wars and a workforce still in shock from several layoffs – and probably more to come with the additional $ 2 billion of discounts promised by Ellison. The promise of the “transformation” of the new leadership is now based on the question of whether they can stimulate efficiency without avoiding the creative nucleus.

To do this, Paramount, a Skydance company, will probably be made in place on the IP optimization strategy of Cardinale. In the cardinal model, each acquisition is intended to survive the cycles and market methods, prospering on the operational rigor and the adaptable “platform value” which overshadows the old mentality of the trophy assets.

And Paramount, with more than 100 years of tradition, more than 1,200 films and distribution rights to thousands of other films, is full of value of the platform.