As first reported by The Post, Paramount Skydance chief David Ellison is in talks with private equity giants including Apollo Global Management to join a possible bid to buy Warner Bros. Discovery – a megadeal that could be worth more than $60 billion.

Sources said Ellison is casting for alternative sources of cash amid doubts whether his dad Larry Ellison – the second-richest person in the world – is enthusiastic about opening his checkbook for another major media acquisition following the $8 billion Paramount deal.

A megadeal for Waner Bros. Discovery could be worth more than $60 billion. Getty Images

Another big worry for the Ellisons, however, is that Comcast may soon jump into the mix, according to sources close to Paramount Skydance. Insiders note that the conglomerate headed by Chairman Brian Roberts is in the middle of breaking out its cable TV properties into a separate company named Versant. 

Once that spinoff is complete, Comcast will consist of its Peacock streaming service, its Universal theme parks, NBC News and Xfinity – a unit that provides internet and cable services.

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According to sources, Skydance is particularly worried about a possible Comcast bid because WBD’s deal-savvy CEO David Zaslav already has a strategic relationship with Comcast’s Xfinity unit to deliver content through the company’s internet service and cable pipes. 

It’s unclear which Comcast unit would make the bid; but the cable giant’s boss Roberts is said to be highly interested in WBD’s content as well as its top-ranked studio and HBO Max streaming service, now the No. 3 most popular.

As first reported by The Post, Paramount Skydance chief David Ellison is in talks with private equity giants including Apollo Global Management to join a possible bid to buy WBD. AFP via Getty Images

“The feeling inside Skydance is that the most likely bidder will be one of the Comcast companies,” said one person with knowledge of Skydance’s deal machinations. 

A Comcast spokesman had no immediate comment; a Skydance spokeswoman had no comment.

As The Post has reported, WBD, which in addition to the No. 1 Hollywood studio owns HBO and CNN, recently turned to Goldman Sachs bankers to gauge the buyout landscape –  just as Ellison leaked he had his eyes on an all-cash bid for the company.  Other bidders Zas and Goldman have shopped to include Netflix and Amazon, sources say.

Still, it’s unclear when – and some say if – David Ellison will make good on his promise to bid on all of WBD with a massive cash offer. People close to Skydance say he can’t completely rely on his father, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, who is hesitant to finance the bid for WBD alone.

Chairman Brian Roberts is in the middle of breaking out its cable TV properties into a separate company named Versant.  Bloomberg via Getty Images

“For cash reasons (David Ellison) has to cobble together people for a deal,” legendary investor Mario Gabelli tells On The Money. Gabelli owns shares of both Paramount and WBD and has been watching the deal drama closely. By his calculations, the Ellisons’ WBD bid could cost even more than $60 billion because of the $30 billion in debt on WBD’s balance sheet — and because Zaslav is shopping the company. 

“There’s a lot of moving parts here,” Gabelli said, including how much if anything Larry Ellison chips in from his own tremendous fortune to help make the numbers work.

Potential investors weighing the WBD deal include Apollo – which in spring 2024 had made a $26 billion, debt-fueled offer for Paramount before ultimately losing that race to Skydance, people with direct knowledge of the situation said.

Once that spinoff is complete, Comcast will consist of its Peacock streaming service, its Universal theme parks, NBC News and Xfinity – a unit that provides internet and cable services. Roberto Machado Noa/Shutterstock

Led by billionaire CEO Marc Rowan, Apollo already owns more than a dozen TV stations through its Cox Media Group as well as a major stake in Legendary Entertainment, a movie and TV production company.

Legendary is a partner in many of Warner Bros.’ top film franchises, including “Dune,” “Godzilla” and “A Minecraft Movie.” Paramount recently signed a multiyear deal to distribute some Legendary films in cinemas, Bloomberg noted in a Wednesday report.

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Apollo appears closest to helping Ellison with the bid, sources said. Billionaire Stephen Schwarzman’s Blackstone, which owns stakes in Hollywood firms including Candle Media – the outfit founded by ex-Disney bigwigs Kevin Mayer and Tom Staggs – has investigated a possible financing role but as of now not interested in participating, sources tell The Post.

Complicating matters further for the Ellison’s is Zaslav’s own restructuring to separate WBD into two units – one with his growth businesses, streaming and studios, and another with his cable properties.

He’s looking for a price just for the streaming and studio unit of over $30 a share – a significant premium to the $22-$24 a share leaked price tag the Ellisons leaked for all of WBD, while touting the recent string of WBD box office hits and his now profitable streaming service, HBO Max.

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The tech unicorn said on its web site that it was experiencing technical difficulties with ChatGPT as well as its other offerings such as the Sora video generating tool.

Social media users said that the service had been down for hours.

ChatGPT users report the chatbot is down. SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

OpenAI is reporting elevated error rates and latency, severely impacting message streams and usability for countless individuals who rely on the platform daily.

An official status page from OpenAI confirms the ongoing incident, stating, “We’re currently experiencing issues” across APIs, ChatGPT and Sora.

AlexPhotoStock – stock.adobe.com

Specifically, “elevated error rates on Sora” have been under investigation for two hours, while broader “elevated error rates and latency across the listed services” (APIs, ChatGPT, Sora) have been ongoing for five hours as of 8 a.m. Eastern time.

Richard Pathray took to X and humorously captured the user experience, writing: “When @ChatGPT is so overworked it can’t even finish your message… Today, many users (myself included) are facing errors in the message stream. Is @OpenAI having a burnout day?”

ChatGPT users report the technology is slow or they’re getting error messages. NurPhoto via Getty Images

The outage has also drawn attention from tech figures like software engineer Gergely Orosz, who noted broader issues.

“What is happening right now? ChatGPT/OpenAI outage for 3 hours. Heroku down for 4 hours (even their status page is down!) NVIDIA dev docs as well (runs on Heroku). Pipedrive (CRM) issues for 4 hours. What else is down… and are these connected? Something started 4 hours ago…”

The independent outage tracking website Downdetector confirmed the severity of the incident, showing a dramatic surge in user-reported problems.

From a near-zero baseline of approximately 25 reports in the early morning hours, the number of reported OpenAI outages skyrocketed to a peak of around 1,250 reports.

This represents a staggering 4,900% increase in just a few hours.

The Post has sought comment from OpenAI.

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Instead of coddling campus antisemites as Sleepy Joe Biden did, Donald Trump is demanding their expulsion. 

Those with green cards who support Hamas are getting expelled.

Trump is cutting off federal aid to Ivy League hotbeds like Columbia and demanding they drop DEI. 

Yet by and large, leftism still rules at our major universities.

But maybe not for long if The Donald uses the ultimate weapon in his arsenal, something that might, just might, make the leftist college crowd turn into born-again MAGAs. 

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I am talking about going after the college endowment systems at a time when they’ve never been as vulnerable.

The market sell-off plus some ill-timed investments made these once formidable pools of cash massively exposed to wonky investments and the heavy hand of the federal government if Trump is willing to turn the screws for maximum financial pain. 

College endowments are a big business, worth nearly $1 trillion in market value, and they’re the lifeblood of most big, elite and lefty schools of so-called higher learning.

I know these places charge an arm and a leg for tuition, but universities need endowments to pay for new buildings, research and all that woke stuff you see in your kids’ core curriculum, plus the salaries of the leftist professors molding young minds. 

Their gains have been juiced by tech stocks, IPOs, M&A and particularly private equity, pools of cash that receive favorable tax treatment for taking companies private and selling them, often at a huge markup. 

If you want to know why college administrators until recently could thumb their nose at critics over being an arm of the woke left, preaching to students that America is a racist hellhole, it’s because they had ­endowment money to burn. 

Alumni balking 

No longer, according to my Wall Street sources who follow the endowment racket.

The stock market’s recent tariff tantrum, the decline in IPOs and M&A volume, which roiled indices further, is just a part of their financial problem.

Particularly at the elite Ivies, alumni are balking at writing big checks, I am told, angered by the endless parade of anti­semites protesting in support of the Oct. 7 massacre and abusing Jewish students in the process, a grotesque spectacle that moronic and woke ­administrators defended as free speech. 

Federal funding is being cut off, too, by the president.

I mentioned Columbia, but Johns Hopkins just announced layoffs and the termination of projects after Trump and his people slashed $800 million in funding to the university.

Trump has promised to end federal funding to any university that doesn’t clamp down on antisemitism, which, if you follow the news, means nearly all the nation’s elite colleges. 

He wants no more DEI language used in classroom instruction, and no more overt celebrations of race and ethnicity financed by the schools.

Go there and you can lose your federal funding as well.

Anticipating less federal aid, Harvard announced a hiring freeze, as have other top schools. 

But again, neither Harvard nor most elite schools have disavowed their progressive leanings.

Here’s how they might.

It’s a little known fact that in recent years endowments have been feasting on private equity, venture capital and other so-called alternative investments.

By some estimates, these investments represent as much as 45% of all holdings. 

Their returns are usually good, but there’s evidence they’ve been underperforming.

They’re also some of the most illiquid investments, which means it’s hard to find buyers if you have to sell them immediately because of a cash crunch. 

Donald Trump could make that cash crunch happen, unleashing a world of hurt on the lefty university ecosystem unless they’re willing to go into massive and expensive debt, which will only lead to more financial pain.

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Or they can do something smart like engaging in the art of the deal with the ultimate dealmaker and change their evil and woke ways. 

Recall during the campaign, Trump floated the idea of an endowment tax well above the meager 1.4% they must pay on returns.

(Before a 2017 Trump tax plan, they paid nothing).

Trump’s VP, J.D. Vance, when he was a senator from Ohio, pushed a 35% tax because the American people shouldn’t be subsidizing left-wing brainwashing with their tax dollars. 

Republicans in Congress are proposing a 21% tax in new legislation.

You get the picture: The tax on top of market losses and illiquid PE means a Trump-induced cash crunch could defund the university endowment system or force colleges to make a choice. 

The choice is theirs 

Will it be Western Civ over Middle Eastern studies?

Professors who want to teach as opposed to those who want to brainwash students with leftist politics?

Merit over DEI?

Scholarships to Americans in need as opposed to foreign students?

Research for transgenderism in mice or treatments for cancer? 

And above all protect Jewish students on their campuses. 

Will he go there?

Trump has said these colleges are coddling “Marxist maniacs,” so presumably he’s open to taxing these funds to the hilt.

The colleges are scrambling because they’re fearing the worst could really happen.

I’m told they’ve hired every flack and lobbyist with GOP street cred and a heartbeat to reach out to Congress with tales of woe if they don’t back off from their precious endowments. 

In other words, if Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress really want to move the university system away from all manner of leftism, they have the ultimate weapon at their disposal at the perfect time in history given the state of the markets. 

I say go for it.

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A tech industry veteran, Mike McCue sees an opening for a different kind of internet where algorithms don’t call the shots. Mr. McCue, the chief executive of the internet company Flipboard, is challenging social media’s automated grip on our attention, betting that humans, not machines, should curate online experiences.

Three decades ago, as vice president of technology at the groundbreaking tech company Netscape, Mr. McCue helped democratize information access through the World Wide Web. Now, he’s positioning his company’s new Surf browser as part of a growing community of so-called decentralized social media options, alongside emerging platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon.

The timing could be fortuitous, as online publishers struggle with an old problem and a new threat. For years, they have worried that the internet’s middlemen — huge platforms like Facebook and TikTok — have weakened their ties with the people who read or view their material. Now publishers face another issue: New A.I. systems that could completely eliminate those fraying links with their audiences.

Surf offers a window into a quiet technology movement echoing the early days of the World Wide Web. With the aid of several internet technical standards that are intended to encourage the growth of a new kind of social media, Mr. McCue has created a potential path where media companies can build direct relationships with readers.

In contrast to the current social web, which is dominated by a few large technology companies, the new software protocols may seem a bit wonky for now. But they make it possible for internet users to communicate and share information without relying on a single centralized service.

One of the new technical standards is known as ActivityPub. Social media platforms using the protocol can talk to one another, allowing users on different networks to interact seamlessly — similar to how email works across different providers.

ActivityPub was formalized in 2018 by the World Wide Web Consortium, a technology standards-making organization. The standard initially drew scant interest. But Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, now known as X, in 2022 has created an exodus of users and publishers looking for alternatives.

Surf allows phone, tablet and personal computer users to curate feeds from a variety of sources into a single dashboard-like view. It will also allow them to publish personally curated collections of information.

Surf is still being privately tested by Mr. McCue’s small company, which plans to offer the program freely later this year. Yet while the open social movement is still small, it has gained attention every time there is a disruptive event such as Mr. Musk’s purchase of Twitter.

Decentralized social media gained significant momentum in 2023 when Meta adopted the ActivityPub standard for its X competitor, Threads, and later announced plans to connect with other ActivityPub-based services. What Mr. McCue calls the “open social web” already has more than 300 million participants, he estimated, and the bulk of them are now Meta’s Threads users.

The shared goal of leading users out of silos accelerated with the recent success of Bluesky, which the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey launched in 2023. Although it is built on a rival standard known as the AT Protocol, a bridge has already been built between the two protocols to make it possible for users of the social media services to connect.

“Everyone has just been copying each other’s features in walled gardens, but now innovation will become decentralized around human connection,” Mr. McCue said in an interview.

Mr. McCue, 56, co-founded Flipboard as a digital news aggregator in 2010. He has made a career of being early to exploit changes in internet technologies. He started Paper Software to make it possible to visually display 3-D information in web browsers and then sold the company to Netscape for $20 million in 1996.

In 1999 he co-founded Tellme Networks, a pioneering effort to create what had been described as a “voice browser” and make it possible to receive internet information via the phone. That company was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for a rumored $800 million.

One of the most significant potentials of the open social web is that it will permit companies to step away from invasive advertising, Mr. McCue said. He describes the alternative as “contextual” advertising to particular interests rather than individuals. For example, ads can be posted to web feeds focused on topics such as backpacking or fashion.

“The notion of creating an audience rather than chasing traffic is something we have been exploring,” said Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, a popular news and media website. “ActivityPub might facilitate that by allowing for more direct and meaningful engagement with our readers.”

In addition to Meta’s decision to base Threads on ActivityPub, news organizations like Bloomberg and the BBC have begun experimenting with the technology, as have blogging platforms such as Medium, WordPress and Ghost.

ActivityPub has also led to a wave of start-up efforts such as Mastodon, a microblogging service that now has more than 14 million accounts connected by a network of over 14,000 host computers, as well as start-ups like Pixelfed and PeerTube, distributed services that offer features similar to Instagram and YouTube.

For several decades, Google’s dominance of internet search has been the driving force behind content creation and distribution. But as Google has invested in generative-A.I. summarization for responses to users’ queries, a window of opportunity for all kinds of discovery tools in addition to chatbots has made the need for alternatives more urgent.

That is a far cry from the very early roots of the World Wide Web in the work of Theodor H. Nelson, who, while a Harvard graduate student in 1961, noticed that text on the first computer monitors could move and that writing no longer needed to be linear. He invented the concept of hypertext, which was later adopted as the underlying structure of the World Wide Web. The designers of the new open social web services believe that their alternative is a step back toward the internet’s original ideals.

“It goes back to the original principles where the internet started out as decentralized,” said Eugen Rochko, the inventor of Mastodon, an open-source social networking platform that allows users to join independently operated servers while staying connected through a global network.

The transition from centralized to decentralized models will require a cultural shift among both publishers and audiences.

“There are significant product questions to solve, such as how to handle moderation and content discovery in a decentralized environment,” said Mike Godwin, a lawyer known for his work on internet rights and digital culture. “But these are the kinds of new problems we should be facing, ones that come with genuine innovation.”

Despite these challenges, the enthusiasm among the early adopters reminds some internet pioneers of the first few years of the World Wide Web.

“The energy around ActivityPub reminds me of the early days of the Web,” Mr. Nelson said in a recent interview, “where anything seemed possible, and innovation was around every corner.”

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The probe was approved by FTC Chair Lina Khan ahead of her likely departure in January. The election of Donald Trump as U.S. president and the expectation he will appoint a fellow Republican with a softer approach toward business, leaves the outcome of the investigation up in the air.

CEO Satya Nadella’s Microsoft is facing a broad antitrust probe. AP

The FTC is examining allegations that the software giant is potentially abusing its market power in productivity software by imposing punitive licensing terms to prevent customers from moving their data from its Azure cloud service to other competitive platforms, sources confirmed earlier this month.

The FTC is also looking at practices related to cybersecurity and artificial intelligence products, the source said on Wednesday.

Microsoft declined to comment.

The FTC fielded complaints about Microsoft last year as it examined the cloud computing market.

NetChoice, a lobbying group that represents online companies including Amazon and Google, which compete with Microsoft in cloud computing, criticized Microsoft’s licensing policies, and its integration of AI tools into its Office and Outlook.

The probe was approved by FTC chair Lina Khan before her likely departure in January. CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

“Given that Microsoft is the world’s largest software company, dominating in productivity and operating systems software, the scale and consequences of its licensing decisions are extraordinary,” the group said.

The FTC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The FTC has demanded a broad range of detailed information from Microsoft, Bloomberg reported earlier on Wednesday.

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