Two CEOs, One Line: What Paramount’s Co-CEO Hire May Teach About the Cost of Overconfidence

Originally published on LinkedIn on October 1, 2026.

Update: As the merger closes, the combined Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery is taking the name Skydance.

Key takeaways

The idea in this issue: the boundary test. When two leaders share the top seat, list the five biggest decisions of the next 18 months and name the owner of each in writing, before anyone starts. If that list is hard to write, the structure is not finished.

Most people will read Paramount’s new Co-CEO as a hiring story. For boards and investors, it is more useful as a structure story.

Minutes after a federal judge approved the antitrust settlement clearing Paramount’s $110 billion combination with Warner Bros. Discovery, David Ellison named former Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz as co-CEO of the merged company. Ellison keeps strategy, creative and technology. Kreiz runs day-to-day operations and the integration.

Kreiz has a serious record, and nothing here is a prediction about how he will do. The point is narrower. A shared top seat creates diligence questions that a single CEO hire does not, and most boards never ask them until something goes wrong.

The Co-CEO role was not a reaction to the merger. Paramount describes it as the end point of a long-term plan, and one source told Variety Ellison had been courting Kreiz for months (Variety).

One detail in that timeline matters more than the rest. Ellison’s statement promises “clear reporting lines.” The same announcement says the businesses will report jointly to both CEOs. Those two ideas can coexist, but only if someone has written down which decisions go to which desk.

When a board hires one CEO, it is betting on a person. When it creates a shared top seat, it is betting on a person and on a boundary.

The boundary at Paramount is drawn by function. Ellison keeps long-term strategy, creative direction, talent relationships, partnerships, technology and capital allocation. Kreiz takes day-to-day management and integration (Paramount).

On paper, that is clean. In practice, a boundary drawn by function holds only until the first decision that belongs to both functions. In a merger this size, that is most of them.

Look at what the first 18 months will actually require. Paramount says the deal should produce more than $6 billion in run-rate synergies and a streaming platform of more than 200 million subscribers (Paramount). Each of the hard decisions behind those numbers sits on both desks:

None of this means the structure will fail. It means the structure is not finished until those decisions have owners.

There is a second asymmetry that the titles hide. Ellison is chairman and CEO, and his family and RedBird Capital control the company. Paramount’s own filings describe it as a “controlled company” under Nasdaq rules, exempt from certain governance requirements (Paramount).

That makes Kreiz the only one of the two leaders who can realistically be replaced. If integration stalls, the pressure has one place to go.

For anyone underwriting this company, that changes where the diligence weight belongs. The Co-CEO is not the junior partner in the risk picture. He is the key person.

The public case for Kreiz comes from two places: Ellison, who chose him, and Gerry Cardinale, founder of RedBird, a co-controlling shareholder and board member (Paramount). Both are architects of the deal. However many outlets quote them, that is one root.

Ellison also said, “We’re like-minded, we see this business the same way.” That is meant as reassurance. Through a diligence lens, it is a flag. Two leaders who see the business the same way are less likely to catch each other’s blind spots, and the board loses the friction a shared seat is supposed to provide.

The independent evidence is Kreiz’s operating record. It is real. Mattel’s first film, Barbie, was the top global box office release of 2023 and Warner Bros. Pictures’ highest-grossing movie ever (Variety). But most of his media operating roles, at Endemol from 2008 to 2011 and Maker Studios after that, are more than a decade old. The question is not whether he is strong. It is whether any of the evidence speaks to integrating two large public media companies at once.

Shared top seats can work. Netflix has run with Co-CEOs for years. And Kreiz’s record at Mattel is the kind boards hope for: a turnaround built on turning brands into entertainment.

The lesson from Disney points somewhere else. In 2020, Disney split power between a new CEO and an executive chairman who kept a hand in creative decisions. Both men have since told the story of how that split went wrong. The weak point was never only the person. It was the line between the two roles, and no one tested it before it mattered.

These apply to a board creating a Co-CEO or CEO and executive chair structure, and to an investor backing a company led by a founder plus an operator.

Paramount has done more planning than most: a months-long search, a named division of labor and an experienced operator in the seat. Whether it works will depend less on either man than on whether the line between them holds under the first hard decisions.

Most boards and investors will never face a structure this public. But shared seats are common at every size: a founder and an operator, a CEO and an executive chair, two partners who built the company together. Before you sign off on one, ask a single question: who owns our five biggest decisions, and who can we replace if the answer turns out to be wrong?

If you are weighing a CEO, a founder or a leadership pair right now, the free Source Map at gannett.partners lets you check your own evidence in about ten minutes. Enter who told you what, and see how many of your sources are really the same source. Nothing you enter leaves your browser. And if you’d like to talk a situation through, I’m glad to.

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Chris Gannett is the founder and CEO of Gannett.Partners, a nationally recognized, Dallas-based firm that provides independent diligence on the founders and CEOs a business depends on. Boards, investors, sponsors and family offices use that work to price and protect the value they’re betting on.