Billionaire Larry Ellison has stepped up, agreeing to personally guarantee part of Paramount’s bid for rival Warner Bros. Discovery.

Ellison’s personal guarantee of $40.4 billion in equity, disclosed Monday, ups the ante in the acrimonious auction for Warner Bros. movie and TV studios, HBO, CNN and Food Network.

Ellison, whose son David Ellison is Paramount’s chief executive, agreed not to revoke the Ellison family trust or adversely transfer its assets while the Warner Bros. transaction is pending. Paramount’s $30-a-share offer remains unchanged.

Warner‘s board earlier this month awarded the prize to Netflix. The board rejected Paramount’s $108.4-billion deal, largely over concerns about the perceived shakiness of Paramount’s financing.

Paramount then launched a hostile takeover, appealing directly to Warner shareholders, offering them $30 a share. Paramount on Monday extended the deadline to Jan. 21 for Warner investors to tender their shares.

“We amended this Offer to address Warner Bros. stated concerns regarding the Prior Proposal and the December 8 Offer,” Paramount said in a Monday Securities & Exchange Commission filing. “Mr. Larry Ellison is providing a personal guarantee of the Ellison Trust’s $40.4 billion funding obligation.”

Warner Bros. Discovery did not provide an immediate comment.

Warner stock jumped 3.5% on the news to $28.75. Paramount shares climbed 4.2% to $13.61 and Netflix fell 1.2% to $93.23.

The Ellison family acquired the controlling stake in Paramount in August. The family launched their pursuit of Warner Bros. in September but Warner’s board unanimously rejected six Paramount proposals over the last three months.

Paramount started with a $19 a share bid for the entire company. Netflix has offered $27.75 a share and only wants the Burbank studios, HBO and the HBO Max streaming service. The Netflix bid is a mix of cash and stock. It envisions Warner Bros. spinning off its linear cable channels, including CNN, into a new publicly traded company, Discovery Global, by the middle of next year.

Paramount upped its all-cash offer to $30 a share Dec. 4, in the waning hours of the auction.

That night, Warner Bros. Discovery’s board voted unanimously to accept Netflix’s $72-billion offer (the total value of the deal is $82.7 billion). The company, in regulatory filings, has cited Netflix’s stronger financial position.

Since then, Paramount executives launched their hostile bid and held meetings with Warner investors in New York, where they echoed the proposal they’d submitted in the closing hours of the auction.

On Monday, Paramount also agreed to increase the termination fee to $5.8 billion from $5 billion, matching the one that Netflix offered. Paramount would have to pay Warner that amount should the deal collapse.

Three Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds representing royal families in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi have agreed to provide $24 billion of the $40.4-billion equity component that Ellison is backing.

The Ellison family has agreed to cover $11.8-billion of that. Initially, Paramount’s bid included the private equity firm of Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, but Kushner withdrew his firm last week. Previously, Paramount dropped the Chinese firm Tencent from its financing consortium over regulatory concerns.

“In an effort to address Warner Bros.’s amorphous need for ‘flexibility’ in interim operations, Paramount’s revised proposed merger agreement offers further improved flexibility to Warner Bros. on debt refinancing transactions, representations and interim operating covenants,” Paramount said in its statement.

Paramount confirmed that the Ellison family trust owns about 1.16 billion shares of Oracle common stock and that all material liabilities are publicly disclosed.

“The Ellison Trust has financial resources well in excess of what would be required to meet its commitments to be entered into in connection with the Offer and the second-step merger [with Paramount], including, among many other assets and financial resources available to it,” Paramount said.

Paramount has been aggressively pursuing Warner Bros. for months, yearning for the scale the Warner assets would bring the company that, before the Ellison takeover, had suffered from years of under-investment.

David Ellison was startled earlier this month when the Warner Bros. board swiftly agreed to a deal with Netflix for $82.7 billion, including some of Warner’s debt, for the streaming and studio assets. He alleged during a CNBC appearance that the Warner Bros. board had failed to seriously consider the merits of his family’s bid.

Paramount subsequently launched its hostile takeover offer in a direct appeal to shareholders. The Warner Bros. board urged shareholders to reject Paramount’s offer, which includes $54 billion in debt commitments, deeming it “inferior” and “inadequate.” The board singled out what it viewed as uncertain financing and the risk implicit in a revocable trust that could cause Paramount to terminate the deal at any time.

Warner added that its shareholders also would have equity in the new Discovery Global, which Warner believes could fetch about $3 a share. Paramount has said its deal is more straightforward. The Ellisons, who enjoy friendly relations with Trump, have told shareholders their deal would face a smoother regulatory review.

Larry Ellison and Trump are on friendly terms, and Ellison’s software company Oracle is part of a consortium taking over social media app TikTok. That deal is expected to close next month.

Trump’s support was also key to the Ellison family’s takeover of Paramount. Before that deal was approved, Paramount agreed to pay Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit over “60 Minutes” edits that most legal experts called frivolous.

Trump has said that he wants CNN to be included in the Warner Bros. sale. Trump has long chafed over CNN’s coverage.

In the past, the president indicated that he favored Paramount’s pursuit of Warner Bros. — but he has been more circumspect in recent weeks, making complimentary comments about Netflix Co-Chief Executive Ted Sarandos.

Executives from both Paramount and Netflix have argued that they would be the best owners and use the Warner Bros. library and movie and TV production capabilities to boost their streaming operations.

Netflix also announced Monday that it has refinanced part of a $59-billion bridge loan with cheaper and longer-term debt.

Bloomberg contributed to this report.

When Mr. Trump signed an executive order in March that promised to restore the Smithsonian Museum “to its rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness,” historians and other observers were anxious about what he meant.

Months later, the president confirmed their worst fears.

“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been,” he wrote in a social media post in August.

The post, which came a week after the White House ordered a review of the museum’s exhibitions, offered the most candid look to date at what many of Mr. Trump’s executive actions on diversity have targeted: the history and experience of Black people in the United States.

High-profile Black leaders have been fired as the president builds an overwhelmingly white administration. Federal websites have been scrubbed to sanitize the country’s history of slavery and discrimination. And other government agencies, like the National Park Service, have also removed exhibits on slavery. At the same time, Mr. Trump has reinstalled statues that glorify Confederate soldiers.

In his first year, Mr. Trump has set out to rewrite the nation’s history by erasing the scars of its original sin.

Photographs by Al Drago, Doug Mills, Maansi Srivastava and Bettmann Archive, via Getty Images.

More than 80,000 service members who went missing in action in previous conflicts are still unaccounted for. However, through research and new technology, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency estimates the remains of 38,000 fallen veterans could be recoverable. Nonprofit organization Project Recover is working with the agency to bring some of those service members home through complex underwater missions.  

“This is a great American story here,” former Navy Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet said. “Our work is to use technology, like underwater drones and scuba diving gear, to find the platforms that these members perished on and then do the DNA analysis of detecting and recovering their remains and matching them to those that are missing.” 

Gallaudet also serves as a Project Recover advisory council member. The group was founded by Dr. Patrick Scannon. He came up with the idea in 1993 when he was touring the Palau islands with his wife and discovered a downed plane from World War II. 

“That 65-foot wing essentially changed my life,” Scannon said in an interview with GoPro.

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Project Recover teams have located dozens of aircraft sites around the Palau islands associated with nearly 100 service members who went missing in action.

“The recovery is difficult. We first have to find the aircraft or ships,” Gallaudet said. “And then we’ve got to go determine if there are any remains there and then ID them, match them to the service members. “

In 1944, U.S. officials determined the Palau islands were a crucial part of a larger mission to liberate the Philippines. The effort to capture the island of Peleliu ended up being a costly effort for the U.S. Located around 500 miles away from the Philippines, the island held an airfield, which U.S. officials believed could be used to launch an attack during their larger mission. More than 10,000 Japanese troops were stationed on Peleliu at the time.  

The battle was expected to last just a few days but ended up going on for 74. The U.S. began its bombardment by dropping more than 600 tons of bombs, but the Marines had little intelligence on enemy positions. Japanese troops hid in coral caves and mine shafts around the islands. The initial aerial attacks had little impact unless pilots flew dangerously close to the island.

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On Peleliu, 1,800 Americans were killed in action and more than 8,000 were wounded or missing. Nearly all the 10,000 Japanese troops were killed in action. Across the Palau islands, the U.S. had carried out nine major air campaigns in which around 200 aircraft were lost.  

Now Project Recover is working to bring some of those service members home. 

“There were three service members on the aircraft that perished, a lieutenant and then two enlisted crew members. And over the last few years, we were able to recover the remains of all three. And we didn’t identify them all at the same time. It took forensic analysis and DNA. Technology. But the last one was finally identified,” Gallaudet said. 

Lt. Jay Manown, AOM1c Anthony Di Petta and ARM1c Wilbur Mitts took off for a bombing mission in September 1944. They were conducting pre-invasion strikes in preparation for the invasion of Peleliu when their plane spun out of control and crashed into surrounding waters.

“The plane was hit by enemy fire, and it burst into flames,” Di Petta’s niece, Suzanne Nakamura, said in an interview with Media Evolve.

Project Recover located the plane in 2015. After more than a dozen dives to investigate the wreckage, teams began removing the remains of the three service members. Lt. Manown was the last to be repatriated. 

“We held the ceremony in his hometown in West Virginia, and the relatives of all three service members came to that final ceremony,” Gallaudet said. 

The three nieces of the men have become especially close.

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“We’ve communicated beautifully and become friends through this experience and almost a sisterhood of type,” Manown’s niece, Rebecca Sheets, said in an interview with Media Evolve.

“We’ve talked so much by phone and feel so close,” Mitt’s niece, Diana Ward, told Media Evolve. “This is just a joy to meet each other in person, and we’re just sharing the emotion we’ve felt about bringing our uncles home.” 

The three women have also connected over how their grandmothers, or the mothers of Manown, Di Petta and Mitts, may have felt about their sons finally coming home. 

“We have a connection because our uncles were involved in not only defending the freedom of the United States, but as human beings who fought together and died together,” Nakamura said.

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Including their work in Palau, Project Recover has completed more than 100 missions across 25 countries. They have repatriated 24 missing Americans and have located more than 200 missing in action awaiting further recovery efforts. The group is raising money for a mission it hopes to complete in 2026 — the search for a B-52 aircraft that disappeared during a training accident. 

“It’s off the coast of Texas. We’ve not yet found the aircraft. And of those eight service members, they all had families,” Gallaudet said. “There are about 32 of those family members still alive today who want the answers to know what happened to their loved ones.”

In addition to the more than 80,000 missing-in-action service members, 20,000 are missing from training accidents. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency is not permitted to allocate funds toward a search effort for the eight men who disappeared along with their B-52 because the crash occurred during a non-conflict training accident. 

“Not having found the wreck yet, we don’t know what the cause of the failure was. And so it’s our goal to find that wreckage and then take the remains and repatriate them to the families,” Gallaudet said. 

The Air Force Bomber was on a routine training mission in February 1968 when it disappeared from radar and radio contact. The Air Force immediately conducted an extensive nine-day search of the flight path but found no trace of the bomber. As the military concluded its search, determining it went down in an unknown location, three pieces of debris washed ashore in Corpus Christi, Texas. 

“This B-52 off the Texas coast hasn’t been located yet, but we think we know where the area is. We’re going to find it,” Gallaudet said.

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More than $300,000 has been raised for the mission so far. Project Recover estimates another $200,000 is needed to search for the eight men. If the organization can locate the remains, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency will be able to allocate resources for a recovery effort. 

You can learn more about Project Recover and the missing B-52 and donate to help with the search on Project Recover’s website.