Elon Musk Could Get Stake in CBS and CNN Under Parmount Merger

Elon Musk may soon have a stake in two of the largest television news operations in the U.S., thanks to the Paramount merger with Warner Bros. Discovery.

Semafor reports that Paramount Skydance executives are looking for sources of cash and are considering asking the tech oligarch and world’s richest man to join a team of equity investors in the company. Musk is one of multiple candidates that Paramount CEO David Ellison is considering, and if it happens, the Tesla CEO would own stakes in both CBS and CNN.

Musk already has a close relationship with Ellison’s father, Oracle founder Larry Ellison. In 2022, the elder Ellison invested $1 billion into Musk’s effort to take over Twitter (now X), and he also invested in Tesla in 2018, later serving on its board of directors.

Musk’s involvement in the merger would have alarming implications for the state of the free press, as his far-right views have become increasingly prevalent on his social media platform, X. The Ellisons’ ownership of CBS has led to a conservative turn at the network, with reactionary Bari Weiss being named editor in chief and gutting its signature news shows, CBS Evening News and 60 Minutes.

Similar fears are being raised about the Ellisons taking over CNN. Musk’s involvement will only heighten those fears, as he professes fascist and xenophobic views almost daily. Several states had sued to stop the Paramount and Warner Bros. merger but settled that lawsuit earlier this week, paving the way for it to go ahead. Now it seems there will soon be a new conservative media giant, flush with cash.

The Trump administration has invited Russian President Vladimir Putin—who is four years into his relentless invasion of Ukraine—to the December G20 summit at President Trump’s golf club in Miami. Putin has yet to accept the invitation.

“We’ve invited President Putin to the G20. We think it’s an opportunity for him to engage not just with the president but also with other world leaders,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday after meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. “We hope that’s an invitation he’ll accept. There’s an opportunity in December, if that happens.”

The summit—one of the most important global affairs meetings—is being held at National Doral Golf Club, the private golf course of the American president. Trump tried a similar move in 2020, but was met with widespread outrage before the summit was canceled anyway because of the Covid-19 pandemic. It seems like the bar for blatant presidential corruption has gotten much lower since then.

If Putin accepts Trump’s invite, this would be the first time he attends the global summit since he led the invasion of Ukraine. It would not only be unprecedented but also awkward, as many other world leaders are diametrically opposed to Putin’s war on Ukraine. He also has an active warrant from the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, as at least 125,000 Ukrainians have been killed in the war thus far, with the most recent attack coming on Wednesday.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told the Kyiv Post earlier this month that he would attend the G20 summit, as well, and would relish the opportunity to meet with Putin face-to-face. Putin has long rejected this, saying he would only meet with Zelenskiy at the Kremlin in Russia. We’ll have to wait and see.

Even Melania Trump is having a difficult time heaping praise on her husband’s second-term performance.

The first lady appeared on Fox News Wednesday morning to discuss the launch of “IMPERIA,” a Davos dupe designed to bring female executives together. But while on air, Melania also offered a rare assessment of Donald Trump’s job, claiming that he’s doing “the best that he can.”

“How’s the president doing in Trump 2 as compared to Trump 1? How do you see him handling the job differently?” asked Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade.

“He’s very focused, he has a lot on his plate. It’s very different what’s going on around the world now,” Melania said. “I think he’s doing the best that he can.”

She added that Trump works “nonstop” and has more energy “than anybody.”

It’s been 611 days since Trump was inaugurated for the second time. In that time span, he launched the country into a forever war with Iran, abducted Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in a midnight raid, leveraged his “hard on crime” rhetoric as an elaborate scheme to justify indiscriminately attacking civilian ships in the Caribbean and the Pacific, weaponized the National Guard and federal law enforcement agents against the American public, and aggravated and damaged America’s longest alliances—most notably with Canada—via a seemingly endless fountain of shitposts.

He also destabilized the federal government, eviscerated critical executive agencies (such as the Education Department and the Environmental Protection Agency), tore down the White House in order to build a $600 million, gold-laden ballroom, ruined the Kennedy Center, pushed for legislation that cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid (forcing millions of Americans off their insurance by 2034), repeatedly kowtowed to Moscow (literally rolling out a red carpet for Russian President Vladimir Putin during his first visit to the U.S. in more than a decade), radically inflamed the cost of living by imposing nonsensical tariffs on America’s trading partners, sent gas prices soaring, and added at least another $3.8 trillion to America’s national debt—just to name a few moves. Amid all of that, he’s also managed to spend nearly a quarter of his second term golfing.

Trump’s souring reputation has been well documented. A survey conducted earlier this month by The Economist/YouGov found that the majority of Americans believe that Trump is “corrupt” (53 percent) and “dangerous” (51 percent). An American Research Group poll published this week clocked Trump’s approval rating at just 29 percent, an all-time low for his political career.

The president seems to understand the writing on the wall well enough himself: Last month, Trump blatantly warned his supporters that he would be impeached if Republicans didn’t win the midterms.

“I’m going to be impeached. They’re going to impeach me,” Trump said at the time.

Just over a month before the midterm elections in November, Texas has a backlog of voter registrations thanks to an error by the state Department of Public Safety.

Votebeat reports that an unknown number of voter registration applications have yet to be processed in Texas due to DPS failing to send the applications that came from the agency’s online driver’s license portal to county officials.

State officials told the news outlet that they would begin delivering the applications to counties overnight. They said that many of the voter registrations were incomplete, but didn’t say exactly what information was missing, how many voters were affected, or when the problem started. The secretary of state’s office said it only discovered the problem last week.

Texas has an October 5 voter registration deadline this year, and depending on the scale of the problem, counties could be backed up with processing voter registrations for the next two weeks. If a voter’s registration is not processed before then, the Texas secretary of state’s office says they can still vote as long as they turned in their application before the deadline.

“A voter who registered through DPS online services but does not appear on the rolls can cast a provisional ballot,” Alicia Pierce, an office spokesperson, said in an email to Votebeat. “Election officials have an established method with DPS to check the transaction. If that voter did register, the provisional vote will be counted.”

From 2020 through 2024, nearly six million Texans used the DPS website to register to vote, according to testimony DPS officials gave to the Texas legislature in 2025. The state has over 18 million registered voters overall. This is only the latest bad news for Texas voters, as Texas’s third largest county, Tarrant County, is closing one-third of its polling stations.

Senator Mitch McConnell is still refusing to speak publicly after a monthslong absence from the Senate, raising concerns about whether he is still fit for office.

A video posted on X Tuesday by Desiree Townsend, the conservative journalist who first reported on McConnell’s health emergency, showed the longtime Kentucky Republican being wheeled into a large black car ahead of a Senate vote.

As Townsend questioned McConnell on his weekend and whether he felt ready to return to work, the Republican offered only a weak wave. “Do you want to be at work, sir? Would you rather be home?” Townsend asked, but still McConnell did not reply. As the car door slowly closed, McConnell held up a peace sign.

In her post, Townsend wrote that McConnell “appeared somewhat confused by the rain and showed a delayed response, but still gave no verbal acknowledgment.”

This isn’t the only alarming development in McConnell’s ongoing health saga. This past weekend, his wife, Elaine Chao, stood in for McConnell at an event at the University of Louisiana’s McConnell Center.

In June, McConnell was found unconscious in his Washington, D.C., home and rushed to the hospital. His office spent weeks refusing to explain his extended hospitalization or elaborate on his eventual return to Capitol Hill. Since returning, McConnell has not appeared lucid or aware, and has remained eerily silent to the public. When the Republican finally did break his silence, he voted incorrectly on a Senate bill and had to be instructed on how to vote.