David Ellison spent much of this week taking a victory lap after, at long last, securing his deal to merge Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery into a media behemoth that now bears the name of the small production company he founded 20 years ago. On Tuesday, a Skydance billboard went up outside Paramount's Times Square headquarters and the new company's stock, $SKYD, debuted on the New York Stock Exchange. Ellison then took questions at an internal town hall and later from reporters, including Status. To detractors, he had an offer: “Give us time, and we’ll prove it.”

But one of the deal’s biggest early skeptics has been Wall Street, which gave him not even a day. Shares of the new company fell nearly 3% in its first session and slid another 8% in the second. Though the stock rebounded from those lows, the early rollercoaster largely boils down to one big number—roughly $80 billion in debt from the $111 billion takeover.