I wasn’t bowled over by the idea of Netflix ownership but a merge of Paramount and Warner seems way, way worse. In a sane political situation this would raise huge antitrust concerns but… well, here we are I guess.
If it does go through I wonder if there’s a scenario where it still works out for Netflix: they could pick up assets at bargain prices when the merged studios inevitably sell and lay off everything they can.
The thing is it is less of an antitrust concern for two also-rans in an industry to merge than it is for the industry leader to buy a struggling competitor. People don’t like the politics of Paramount’s ownership but from a competition perspective this is the better outcome.
We’re talking about multiple industries here. In streaming Netflix is dominant. In terms of movie production studio Netflix is the also-ran compared to Warner and Paramount.
A purchase by Netflix would give them something they currently do not have. A purchase by Paramount is a much more direct merge of two competitors.
If the industry is defined as one that makes entertainment, then no one is dominant. Oracle and bytedance (tiktok), Meta (instagram), Alphabet (youtube), Reddit, Video Games, and even the sports leagues are huge competitors for screen time.
Even restricting the industry to professionally made videos, there is Apple, Amazon, Comcast, Disney, Netflix, Sony, and Paramount. Ignoring the small ones like A24 and Lionsgate. Having or not having Warner Bros be a separate entity seems inconsequential, considering the weight of the others.
Maybe this is too much of a side topic or tangent, but I think that mergers shouldn’t be legal by default once a company is a certain size, regardless of the level of competition.
I understand that there is a lot of competition and that a merger at this stage probably won’t harm competition significantly.
But that shaky justification can be used until suddenly there isn’t sufficient competition.
This reminds me of a recent Wendover Productions video talking about antitrust waivers for airline alliances flying transatlantic flights. In recent waiver applications, the ability to compete with other airline alliance conglomerates that have received antitrust exceptions is the justifying reason for requesting an antitrust exception, and that keeps happening until the industry becomes wildly consolidated.
I think our antitrust system should say, while you have a lot of competitors, and under that criteria you would be allowed to merge, but your company revenue/market cap/employee count/majority owner wealth is too high to be eligible to merge. You’re sufficiently large and prosperous, there is no need to grow your company larger through M&A. If you don’t like the business environment you are in, change your operations. You have the money to pursue your goals.
>but your company revenue/market cap/employee count/majority owner wealth is too high to be eligible to merge
Can you posit numbers for these 4 figures (although I don't know how you could calculate "majority owner wealth" when the majority owner is usually 401Ks and pension funds)? Also, if the goal is to stop a business from getting "bigger", then shouldn't there be a strict cap on the measures, rather than just preventing mergers?
If 1M employees is too many, then the business simply should not be allowed to hire more. If $x market cap is too high, then the business should be forced to issue dividends. If the revenue is too high, then it should be forced to stop selling whatever it is selling once it reaches that revenue.
> People don’t like the politics of Paramount’s ownership but from a competition perspective this is the better outcome.
This was a much more compelling argument 14-odd months ago. People don’t like the politics of Paramount’s ownership because they’re aligned with the authoritarians currently trying to take control of the country - this isn’t a dispute over tax policy.
Yes, it’s a dispute about antitrust policy not tax policy. The criteria for that analysis is consumer surplus, not the political beliefs of the owners.
It’s not a dispute about antitrust policy either, or at least not directly. Paramount has been aggressively reshaping its content to please the current administration for purposes of buying political favor. There’s an antitrust component to that, in that the more properties they acquire, the fewer voices aren’t effectively controlled by the regime, but the opposition to Paramount’s purchasing spree is political and should be properly seen as such.
Well political differences is not a valid reason to block a merger in the US (see TWC and AT&T’s merger in his first term for an example of that strategy failing).
That was part of Paramount’s offer/threat to WBD, though - “the administration likes us.” I agree with you that it’s unlikely to block the merger, but I think saying this is a win for the consumer is ignoring a whole lot of context.
Netflix is going to buy them both for the same price in about 5 years. Paramount is a highly leveraged company. They are not going to come out of this very expensive acquisition unscathed.
> Paramount is a highly leveraged company. They are not going to come out of this very expensive acquisition unscathed.
Is this before or after Ellison et co gut the news side of the organization to create another Fox New / RT? We've already seen what happened with 60 Minutes and CBS News:
Ellison is more pragmatic than his current activities make it appear. He's playing to the right wing now because Trump was in office, but during the last administration he played heavily to the left.
When push comes to shove, he'll follow the money. If Republicans lose the midterms, CBS will start shifting back to the middle to regain the millions of viewers it lost to NBC and ABC since Weiss took over and Weiss will probably be looking for a new job.
> Affinity Partners, the private equity firm led by Jared Kushner, is part of Paramount's hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros Discovery, according to a regulatory filing
> Affinity Partners was not mentioned in Paramount's press release on Monday morning about its $108 billion bid, nor were participating sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and Qatar.
> Recent public reports and a Senate investigation have uncovered significant evidence that Mr. Kushner acted as an unregistered foreign agent of [SA]
>> Kushner - who was never credentialed by State Department, an ambassador, or registered as a foreign agent in the US or in any other country - has now, in 2025, helped sell Electronic Arts to SA and is trying to help sell Warner Brothers Discovery to SA, a foreign territory which does not support Freedom of Speech.
>> Trump wanted Ellison to purchase TikTok (from the owners in China that weren't offering to sell it) so that US data would remain in the US.
>> By comparison, why did Trump/Kushner help sell EA (NFL Madden, NBA Live, PGA Tour,) to foreign interests, and why is Trump/Kushner trying to help sell WBD to foreign interests?
I’m sure this administration has some plan to fund this. They want to turn our airwaves in far right propaganda machines, they’ll find a $100 billion somewhere.
I'm hope not, and that they'll instead spin out WB, for it to be gobbled up again. Anything done three times is tradition, and breaking it just wouldn't do.
Interesting perspective, here, from someone who has observed a tiny bit of unknown streaming history.
So, way back in the day, 2005, Turner Broadcast corp. launched this weird-ass thing, known as GameTap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameTap . It was a subscription-based service that offered on-demand retro videogames. While it started as a way to play MAME Pac-Man and Metal Slug legally from a legit service, it grew into a competitor in the online games market arena in a time when Steam was still nascent.
The whole thing was created by this amazing fellow named Blake Lewin. Blake was really sharp, and having built this on-demand, streaming emulation service, he even went on to add at-the-time-modern games. Now, this stuff literally just installed the game on your HD and let you play, so it wasn't quite Stadia or Luma, but it was absolutely ahead of its time, and it was really slick.
I was a journalist then, and while games journalists get pampered, Turner moving into games was on another level. They launched this thing at the Armani Store on Market St. in SF, and when you walked in, they asked you to pick some sun-glasses from the case to take with you when you left.
GameTap was great and even gathered a following, but from the moment it launched, I knew what it really was: Turner's scientific experiment to build the infrastructure to later allow it to stream its enormous library of content. Movies, cartooons, TV shows, etc.
I was having lunch with Blake, a few years into GameTap, and I asked him point blank how the video streaming prototypes were coming (pure guess, no evidence). He was baffled and wanted to know how I knew they were working on that. Said it had been going great!
But in the end, the service never launched, AFAIK. Maybe some remnant is still there somewhere, but it just shows, you can be years ahead in your planning and development, and still end up alone at the end dance. It's a shame. Turner has so many great things in their library, why is it not possible for me to just pay someone for access to all the old movies in the TCM vault!?
I vaguely remember watching a video that held that a huge factor in the dot-com crash was a revelation that the build-out of broadband (last-mile fiber-optic in particular) was going to be way slower than initially thought, which left a ton of nascent services dead in the water.
It feels like that was something companies were still feeling the sting of through the early 2010s. So many services and platforms that launched and, whoops, there still aren't enough Americans with fast-enough internet to support them. And then echoes of it in sectors like VR.
The thing is, it wasn't just that all of these companies were making stupid miscalculations. They seemed to have been earnestly following forecasts for adoption, only to have the other companies that controlled how much of the public was going to be able to access those resources in the following month, year, 3 years, etc., slow-walk their roll-outs for their own strategic benefit.
It makes me feel a little better that I can almost never afford to be an early-adopter for these things anyway, but it's frustrating as a consumer to see how long it takes for them to finally hit the market in a robust way (and eventually become cheap enough for mass consumption).
We're all used to instant hi-def YouTube but it wasn't until pretty darn recently that the average household had access to Internet fast enough to stream those qualities, and devices to play them.
Gametap was so great and really underrated at the time. I think I probably ended up introducing it to 4-5 people.
We're starting to see some gametap-esqu stuff again these days but it's like 15 years later and the quality isn't there for me. Even though my employer keeps giving me free Xbox ultimate subscriptions I never really use them. I think a big part was gametap was so frictionless, you boot up the client and start playing.
Netflix win this by losing. Paramount has massively overpaid for Warner Brothers, and taken on a crippling amount of debt. It was existential for them, they had a failing studio and streaming service which they hope Warners IP and HBO can compensate for.
Let's not forget that Warner Brothers has been a bit of an albatross and never made money for anyone, that's why it's passed through so many different hands. Time, AoL Discovery to name a few.
Now Paramount are going to be sitting there with a mountain of debt, while Netflix and Disney are relatively debt free and very profitable and cash generative.
$2.8B! Which isn't huge next to Netflix's market value of $357B... but when you compare it with its $45B 2025 yearly revenue, it's at least a noticeable bump. You could make almost 4 five-season-long Stranger Things with it.
Based on how the takeover of CBS has been going, it really does seem like waning support for Israel is the major motivation behind this huge consolidation. Pretty unbelievable to watch
In a matter of months: Paramount, CBS, TikTok, CNN, FreePress...
This is 100% the reason. They have the money, they have the motive, they have donated enough to end up with the political support to win any antitrust case filed against them. And they have the networks with bots and sycophants that will argue endlessly on their behalf. Religion is a scarily powerful motivator.
Yes. But it may be the Ellisons victory politically. Elon was made to pay a lot for Twitter and I would argue he won and greatly damaged our politics in the process, by amplifying far right extremists.
The Ellisons already own Star Trek, and I shudder to think what they will do with it once the current shows are out of the pipeline. Now they get to do it to DC Comics and their characters. Which is I guess good news for Frank Miller, bad news for the rest of us.
Well, hope you enjoyed Pax Americana. We're heading into something that feels... about halfway between reich-y and soviet-y, at least on the propaganda front. Which is deeply ironic, of course.
Yea Paramounts behavior doesn’t seem rational if the direct economics of the companies involved were the only concern.
But given that Paramount wanted to buy the CNN portion of the business that Netflix wasn’t even bidding on, it kinda seems like they have a longer term goal in place.
Sure, I'd be willing to walk away with a briefcase holding $2.8 Billion with a B. How much stock would that buy back? Doubtful shareholders see any dividends from it.
I think Netflix is incredibly foolish for letting Paramount scoop this up, and their leadership is taking a huge gamble that the very broad media empire the extreme right has and is building in combination with unilateral control of the government will not be used to seriously undermine companies like Netflix in the coming years.
Netflix isn't going to be simply competing against Paramount/WBD, they are going to be competing against the State's custom built propaganda machine.
Because the company lives in a free society and has benefitted from being in that free society?
Just ask the folks in Hungary or (esp.) Russia what happens when all the independent media gets bought up by government sycophants: do you want to live in that kind of society?
I think you overestimate the influence of traditional media these days. CNN is a declining asset. Nobody under 60 gets their news from these places. Anyway, by the time the deal closes Trump will be in lamb duck status.
And the amount of debt being taken on for the deal is astronomical.
There is a post Trump world. These companies have to be financially successful in.
Exactly right, which is why I will bring up that the same company that will own WBD (cnn) will also own in major part Tiktok, which is exactly where younger people get their news.
I think this will work out nicely for Netflix. It overleverages their competition, putting them in a worse spot, and I suspect traditional media is going to be far less of an demand from a pure screen-time perspective in the next 10 years. Generative content is just starting to get good enough with Seedance 2 - the cost of creation is about to plumet.
This is exactly what I'm hoping for. When these tools get to a certain level I'd love to see a TV adaptation of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
Are they truly over leveraged when the purchase is being backstopped by countries like Saudi Arabia that have unlimited funds? I feel like people said the same thing about the Twitter purchase being over leveraged and it looks like Musk is about to very successfully offload that entire debt bomb onto happy public investors via SpaceX. I think this could work out quite well for the Ellisons, Trumps and Saudis, this purchase really bulks up their media empire and increases their ability to control public opinion via all major forms of modern media (Streaming, Tiktok, 24 hour news networks).
Paramount has a lot of problems right now, financially. Maybe Netflix plans to buy them both in the next few years after those issues come home to roost for Paramount.
I was looking forward to good UX accessing HBO through Netflix. Too bad, but looking forward to good UX accessing HBO, and paramount (?) some day down the line through Netflix when this converges.
After the Paramount & Warner merger it will be good if they launch a Criterion Collection type of thing with the outstanding back catalog, going in the other direction of streaming, and producing and selling good quality Blu ray hardware. In my dreams of course.
My guess is that they are looking forward to juicy licensing deals with OpenAI, Google or Meta for the rights to generate AI content featuring Batman, Harry Potter, and other characters in the WB stable.
No mention of Trump issuing insane threats against a Netflix board member and Netflix itself, in the story or the comments, because that is just normal now I guess.
I literally do not understand this perspective. If that was true they would have let Netflix buy Warner Bros., which would have spun off CNN, and Skydance could have scooped it up for much much less money than buying the entirety of Warner Bros/discovery.
Paramount's financing package combines roughly $45–46 billion in equity with more than $57 billion in debt.
The deal values Warner Bros. Discovery at around $111 billion ($31 per share), and including WBD's existing debt, the total takeover comes to more than $110 billion. NBC News
It would be the largest leveraged buyout (LBO) in history, with $87 billion of total pro forma gross debt and an estimated gross leverage of approximately 7x 2026 EBITDA before synergies.
My question is: who is lending the money for these leveraged buyout deals? They seem to leave the lenders holding the bag at some point when it all implodes. Do these deals really pay off often enough to be worth financing them?
> who is lending the money for these leveraged buyout deals? They seem to leave the lenders holding the bag at some point when it all implodes. Do these deals really pay off often enough to be worth financing them?
For this deal, it is:
- ~$57b Debt financing: Bank of America, Citigroup, Apollo
- ~$46b Equity backing: Ellison's dad, RedBird Capital Partners
- Sovereign wealth funds on the equity side: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi
They keep financing these deals so they must be making money on them but there is so much value destruction in so many of these cases. Someone has to be left holding the bag of hot garbage in the end so who is taking the loss?
We know private equity offloads the debt onto the walking corpse and usually pays themselves huge fees and bonuses for their "assistance". So it is clear how they make money. I just don't get how the banks make out.
I’m so happy, because I collect movies and the idea of Netflix putting the entire WB catalog behind a subscription with no purchase option sounds awful to me.
So NF is just not matching or exceeding an elevated Paramount offer... But could WBD still choose the already on the table NF deal at the end of the day? I guess with the sort of statement that Netflix made though, it's likely WBD would not and realizes NF is just done at this point. Or maybe it's some sort of double bluff by NF? Hard to really know for sure.
It would not be in WBD shareholders interest to walk away from Paramount's overpayment. It is a great deal for WBD shareholders, but a poor financial outcome for Paramount. Netflix's discipline is noteworthy.
Like many things, phone OS, desktop OS, CPUs, GPUs, ride sharing, credit card payments, video game consoles, we are heading towards a Disney/Paramount duopoly
They've always been dead for a segment of the population. And its the section of population "We" (royal) chose.
Unfortunately, We have exhausted the existing people we demolished. Now, who is being sacrificed is moving further up the economic foodchain with no real end in sight.
> Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos failed Thursday to convince a skeptical Trump administration to approve his proposed takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery – and with that, his nearly done deal to buy WBD’s streaming service and studio went into a death spiral.
Is this about the price of the deal or the administration not approving mergers that they think don’t align with right wing ideology?
I wrote the following comment 4 months ago when Larry Ellison bought Tiktok (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45267643 ). Reposting it here, verbatim since it is part of the same story (imo) and everything in it has been confirmed in the last 4 months except for the last paragraph. I guess we will find out eventually :
So Larry Ellison just took over Paramount group which is now looking to bid for Warner Brothers and CNN. And now Ellison is going to take over TikTok.
Paramount(being run by Larry Ellison's son) is looking to install the pro-israel-propagandist who has variously masqueraded as a liberal, a conservative and anti-woke free-speech champion, Bari Weiss[1] as CBS's editor-in-chief or co-president[2]. It also bears mentioning that Ellison is a life-long zionist, friend of the IDF and close personal friend of Netanyahu to whom he even offered a post at Oracle.[3]
This very much looks like a hostile take-over of the American mind by a tech billionaire who just overtook Elon Musk to become the world's richest man. People should be talking about whether they want to go through this all over again.
I wasn’t bowled over by the idea of Netflix ownership but a merge of Paramount and Warner seems way, way worse. In a sane political situation this would raise huge antitrust concerns but… well, here we are I guess.
If it does go through I wonder if there’s a scenario where it still works out for Netflix: they could pick up assets at bargain prices when the merged studios inevitably sell and lay off everything they can.
The thing is it is less of an antitrust concern for two also-rans in an industry to merge than it is for the industry leader to buy a struggling competitor. People don’t like the politics of Paramount’s ownership but from a competition perspective this is the better outcome.
We’re talking about multiple industries here. In streaming Netflix is dominant. In terms of movie production studio Netflix is the also-ran compared to Warner and Paramount.
A purchase by Netflix would give them something they currently do not have. A purchase by Paramount is a much more direct merge of two competitors.
If the industry is defined as one that makes entertainment, then no one is dominant. Oracle and bytedance (tiktok), Meta (instagram), Alphabet (youtube), Reddit, Video Games, and even the sports leagues are huge competitors for screen time.
Even restricting the industry to professionally made videos, there is Apple, Amazon, Comcast, Disney, Netflix, Sony, and Paramount. Ignoring the small ones like A24 and Lionsgate. Having or not having Warner Bros be a separate entity seems inconsequential, considering the weight of the others.
Maybe this is too much of a side topic or tangent, but I think that mergers shouldn’t be legal by default once a company is a certain size, regardless of the level of competition.
I understand that there is a lot of competition and that a merger at this stage probably won’t harm competition significantly.
But that shaky justification can be used until suddenly there isn’t sufficient competition.
This reminds me of a recent Wendover Productions video talking about antitrust waivers for airline alliances flying transatlantic flights. In recent waiver applications, the ability to compete with other airline alliance conglomerates that have received antitrust exceptions is the justifying reason for requesting an antitrust exception, and that keeps happening until the industry becomes wildly consolidated.
I think our antitrust system should say, while you have a lot of competitors, and under that criteria you would be allowed to merge, but your company revenue/market cap/employee count/majority owner wealth is too high to be eligible to merge. You’re sufficiently large and prosperous, there is no need to grow your company larger through M&A. If you don’t like the business environment you are in, change your operations. You have the money to pursue your goals.
>but your company revenue/market cap/employee count/majority owner wealth is too high to be eligible to merge
Can you posit numbers for these 4 figures (although I don't know how you could calculate "majority owner wealth" when the majority owner is usually 401Ks and pension funds)? Also, if the goal is to stop a business from getting "bigger", then shouldn't there be a strict cap on the measures, rather than just preventing mergers?
If 1M employees is too many, then the business simply should not be allowed to hire more. If $x market cap is too high, then the business should be forced to issue dividends. If the revenue is too high, then it should be forced to stop selling whatever it is selling once it reaches that revenue.
I didn’t intend to flesh out these details thoroughly, but present the idea in spirit, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it needs tweaking as you mention.
> People don’t like the politics of Paramount’s ownership but from a competition perspective this is the better outcome.
This was a much more compelling argument 14-odd months ago. People don’t like the politics of Paramount’s ownership because they’re aligned with the authoritarians currently trying to take control of the country - this isn’t a dispute over tax policy.
Yes, it’s a dispute about antitrust policy not tax policy. The criteria for that analysis is consumer surplus, not the political beliefs of the owners.
It’s not a dispute about antitrust policy either, or at least not directly. Paramount has been aggressively reshaping its content to please the current administration for purposes of buying political favor. There’s an antitrust component to that, in that the more properties they acquire, the fewer voices aren’t effectively controlled by the regime, but the opposition to Paramount’s purchasing spree is political and should be properly seen as such.
Well political differences is not a valid reason to block a merger in the US (see TWC and AT&T’s merger in his first term for an example of that strategy failing).
That was part of Paramount’s offer/threat to WBD, though - “the administration likes us.” I agree with you that it’s unlikely to block the merger, but I think saying this is a win for the consumer is ignoring a whole lot of context.
Paramount is the struggling competitor in this equation.
State AGs play a role in anti trust enforcement. So it’s not over yet.
When has a state AG successfully cancelled a merger? Did any state try to prevent Microsoft and Activision's merger?
Kroger/Albertsons Merger (2024-2025), JetBlue/Spirit Merger (2024), Visa/Plaid Merger (2021), "Capture-and-Kill" Ski Resort Acquisition (2021-2022), Hospital Mergers (Various 2024) are a few.
IIRC these also involved the Feds.
When Feds are not involved, its harder for State AGs to win. Not impossible. And they can slow things down / get concessions.
[dead]
I guess this would qualify as a protrust operation
Netflix is going to buy them both for the same price in about 5 years. Paramount is a highly leveraged company. They are not going to come out of this very expensive acquisition unscathed.
> Paramount is a highly leveraged company. They are not going to come out of this very expensive acquisition unscathed.
Is this before or after Ellison et co gut the news side of the organization to create another Fox New / RT? We've already seen what happened with 60 Minutes and CBS News:
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/29/bari-weiss-c...
* https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/01/26/inside-bari-we...
I’ve listened to Bari for years in her podcast and she’s indistinguishable from every liberal I was around in the 80s and 90s.
Choosing not to jump aboard all the insane modern woke politics doesn’t make you some scary right winger.
She could only help a legacy news outfit in my opinion.
Ellison is more pragmatic than his current activities make it appear. He's playing to the right wing now because Trump was in office, but during the last administration he played heavily to the left.
When push comes to shove, he'll follow the money. If Republicans lose the midterms, CBS will start shifting back to the middle to regain the millions of viewers it lost to NBC and ABC since Weiss took over and Weiss will probably be looking for a new job.
How many people are going to watch a right wing CNN? We saw the CBS viewership for the new partisan news plummet.
At the end of the day, you have to draw attention to make money.
Is it rumor or true that Saudis or some middle eastern financiers are part of the Paramount bid?
Maybe you're thinking of tiktok?
"After Hostile Takeover Fail, Ellison's Paramount Skydance Sues WBD Netflix" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642776
"Jared Kushner is part of Paramount's hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery" https://www.axios.com/2025/12/08/jared-kushner-paramount-war... .. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46195124 :
> Affinity Partners, the private equity firm led by Jared Kushner, is part of Paramount's hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros Discovery, according to a regulatory filing
> Affinity Partners was not mentioned in Paramount's press release on Monday morning about its $108 billion bid, nor were participating sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and Qatar.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196242 :
> "Letter to DOJ on Kushner - FARA (Wyden - Raskin) final.pdf" (October 2024) https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/demo... :
> Recent public reports and a Senate investigation have uncovered significant evidence that Mr. Kushner acted as an unregistered foreign agent of [SA]
>> Kushner - who was never credentialed by State Department, an ambassador, or registered as a foreign agent in the US or in any other country - has now, in 2025, helped sell Electronic Arts to SA and is trying to help sell Warner Brothers Discovery to SA, a foreign territory which does not support Freedom of Speech.
"Kushner's Affinity Partners exits Paramount bid for Warner Bros. Discovery" (2025-12) https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/16/kushner-affinity-paramount-w...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196370 :
>> Trump wanted Ellison to purchase TikTok (from the owners in China that weren't offering to sell it) so that US data would remain in the US.
>> By comparison, why did Trump/Kushner help sell EA (NFL Madden, NBA Live, PGA Tour,) to foreign interests, and why is Trump/Kushner trying to help sell WBD to foreign interests?
WBD includes franchises like Batman, Superman, CNN, HBO, and Chuck (TV Series).
Why did Kushner and Affinity Partners try to sell these American companies to foreign interests?
I’m sure this administration has some plan to fund this. They want to turn our airwaves in far right propaganda machines, they’ll find a $100 billion somewhere.
As long as they get to keep a media alt-right afloat in politics, it doesn't matter their value.
I'm hope not, and that they'll instead spin out WB, for it to be gobbled up again. Anything done three times is tradition, and breaking it just wouldn't do.
The Ellisons have zero liquidity issues. Theyll sell off parts to cut costs but no chance they sell the stuff they actually want
I would not bet against RedBird and Ellisons.
One must.
Interesting perspective, here, from someone who has observed a tiny bit of unknown streaming history.
So, way back in the day, 2005, Turner Broadcast corp. launched this weird-ass thing, known as GameTap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameTap . It was a subscription-based service that offered on-demand retro videogames. While it started as a way to play MAME Pac-Man and Metal Slug legally from a legit service, it grew into a competitor in the online games market arena in a time when Steam was still nascent.
The whole thing was created by this amazing fellow named Blake Lewin. Blake was really sharp, and having built this on-demand, streaming emulation service, he even went on to add at-the-time-modern games. Now, this stuff literally just installed the game on your HD and let you play, so it wasn't quite Stadia or Luma, but it was absolutely ahead of its time, and it was really slick.
I was a journalist then, and while games journalists get pampered, Turner moving into games was on another level. They launched this thing at the Armani Store on Market St. in SF, and when you walked in, they asked you to pick some sun-glasses from the case to take with you when you left.
GameTap was great and even gathered a following, but from the moment it launched, I knew what it really was: Turner's scientific experiment to build the infrastructure to later allow it to stream its enormous library of content. Movies, cartooons, TV shows, etc.
I was having lunch with Blake, a few years into GameTap, and I asked him point blank how the video streaming prototypes were coming (pure guess, no evidence). He was baffled and wanted to know how I knew they were working on that. Said it had been going great!
But in the end, the service never launched, AFAIK. Maybe some remnant is still there somewhere, but it just shows, you can be years ahead in your planning and development, and still end up alone at the end dance. It's a shame. Turner has so many great things in their library, why is it not possible for me to just pay someone for access to all the old movies in the TCM vault!?
I vaguely remember watching a video that held that a huge factor in the dot-com crash was a revelation that the build-out of broadband (last-mile fiber-optic in particular) was going to be way slower than initially thought, which left a ton of nascent services dead in the water.
It feels like that was something companies were still feeling the sting of through the early 2010s. So many services and platforms that launched and, whoops, there still aren't enough Americans with fast-enough internet to support them. And then echoes of it in sectors like VR.
The thing is, it wasn't just that all of these companies were making stupid miscalculations. They seemed to have been earnestly following forecasts for adoption, only to have the other companies that controlled how much of the public was going to be able to access those resources in the following month, year, 3 years, etc., slow-walk their roll-outs for their own strategic benefit.
It makes me feel a little better that I can almost never afford to be an early-adopter for these things anyway, but it's frustrating as a consumer to see how long it takes for them to finally hit the market in a robust way (and eventually become cheap enough for mass consumption).
We're all used to instant hi-def YouTube but it wasn't until pretty darn recently that the average household had access to Internet fast enough to stream those qualities, and devices to play them.
Gametap was so great and really underrated at the time. I think I probably ended up introducing it to 4-5 people.
We're starting to see some gametap-esqu stuff again these days but it's like 15 years later and the quality isn't there for me. Even though my employer keeps giving me free Xbox ultimate subscriptions I never really use them. I think a big part was gametap was so frictionless, you boot up the client and start playing.
I remember GameTap. American McGee launched his game, American McGee's Grimm on that, for free afaik (or free for a limited time).
Netflix win this by losing. Paramount has massively overpaid for Warner Brothers, and taken on a crippling amount of debt. It was existential for them, they had a failing studio and streaming service which they hope Warners IP and HBO can compensate for.
Let's not forget that Warner Brothers has been a bit of an albatross and never made money for anyone, that's why it's passed through so many different hands. Time, AoL Discovery to name a few.
Now Paramount are going to be sitting there with a mountain of debt, while Netflix and Disney are relatively debt free and very profitable and cash generative.
This means Netflix still has all that cash they were planning to spend on WB, plus the 2.5B breakup fee from WB.
They could arguably just build a better WB from scratch with that kind of money.
$2.8B! Which isn't huge next to Netflix's market value of $357B... but when you compare it with its $45B 2025 yearly revenue, it's at least a noticeable bump. You could make almost 4 five-season-long Stranger Things with it.
> You could make almost 4 five-season-long Stranger Things with it.
4 good long running series is all HBO needed to become successful, so they got a free HBO.
It's more than the quarterly net income last year. So still quite a lot.
$2.8B is $2.8B
They've spent many multiples of that on their throwaway binge content but that doesn't get them to something as culturally valuable as WB.
It's WB's back catalog that is the main prize.
Or just buy Paramount in a couple of years.
> They could arguably just build a better WB from scratch with that kind of money.
How does one build a back catalogue going back decades, including things like Casablanca, Superman/Batman, Harry Potter, and V for Vendetta?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_Warner_Bros._films
Harry Potter is played out. The author is a bigot. Their classics like Casablanca, maybe there is some value there.
> Harry Potter is played out.
Is that why they're doing a remake?
* https://www.hollywood.com/news/a-new-version-of-the-original...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_(TV_series)
The people who were kids when the original movies came out are now parents themselves: they're going for nostalgia and new audiences.
Based on how the takeover of CBS has been going, it really does seem like waning support for Israel is the major motivation behind this huge consolidation. Pretty unbelievable to watch
In a matter of months: Paramount, CBS, TikTok, CNN, FreePress...
It really does not.
This is 100% the reason. They have the money, they have the motive, they have donated enough to end up with the political support to win any antitrust case filed against them. And they have the networks with bots and sycophants that will argue endlessly on their behalf. Religion is a scarily powerful motivator.
Saudis are sponsoring this
Totally incorrect. The Ellisons and Bari Weiss are known for being massive Zionists.
It's not Israel (though that may be a factor) it's Trump. It's textbook media capture. We're speedrunning the Victor Orban playbook.
Well, Netflix did succeed at making the Ellisons pay a large fortune for something that costs a small fortune.
Yes. But it may be the Ellisons victory politically. Elon was made to pay a lot for Twitter and I would argue he won and greatly damaged our politics in the process, by amplifying far right extremists.
[dead]
That doesn’t matter. It’s a $100 billion to replace a lot of sane media with far right propaganda.
The Ellisons already own Star Trek, and I shudder to think what they will do with it once the current shows are out of the pipeline. Now they get to do it to DC Comics and their characters. Which is I guess good news for Frank Miller, bad news for the rest of us.
Netflix so far has been the only consistent winning team in the streaming competition.
It is pretty clear that Trump wanted Paramount to win so it is smart for them to cut their losses.
waits 20 minutes, cool, interest just covered whatever that extra was
Now they can control millennial and younger minds by controlling what CNN broadcasts.
Young people are more into TikTok than CNN, and the Ellisons already control that in the U.S.
…young people don’t watch CNN.
Nobody watches CNN
I feel like you're posting some humorous sarcasm and are being misunderstood.
You are correct. Maybe this is just a very dumb move Paramount and those funding this acquisition.
tick, tock
Isnt that the golden round robot that needs wound up every so often?
(Crossing the chasm of Sar)
they're listening
Well, hope you enjoyed Pax Americana. We're heading into something that feels... about halfway between reich-y and soviet-y, at least on the propaganda front. Which is deeply ironic, of course.
CNN has lower viewership than some YouYube channels. I think it will be fine.
CNN isn’t the only factor here. If you’re looking to shape the public consciousness all media is on the table.
Sounds like we need to get the public to stop watching this garbage then.
Paramount agreed to pay the $2.8 billion breakup fee that WBD would owe Netflix if that deal didn’t go through.
The behavior of each party in this whole process gives you a lot more confidence in Netflix leadership than Paramount / Skydance.
Paramount was about to go to idiotic lengths to get this. Netflix is willing to walk away.
Yea Paramounts behavior doesn’t seem rational if the direct economics of the companies involved were the only concern.
But given that Paramount wanted to buy the CNN portion of the business that Netflix wasn’t even bidding on, it kinda seems like they have a longer term goal in place.
Sure, I'd be willing to walk away with a briefcase holding $2.8 Billion with a B. How much stock would that buy back? Doubtful shareholders see any dividends from it.
Share price of Netflix jumped 10% after the news broke. Pretty sure shareholders will see a lot of upside.
I think Netflix is incredibly foolish for letting Paramount scoop this up, and their leadership is taking a huge gamble that the very broad media empire the extreme right has and is building in combination with unilateral control of the government will not be used to seriously undermine companies like Netflix in the coming years.
Netflix isn't going to be simply competing against Paramount/WBD, they are going to be competing against the State's custom built propaganda machine.
But i can understand the sentiment: Why should a company fight this fight? They are not incentivized to overpay for politics of that caliber.
> Why should a company fight this fight?
Because the company lives in a free society and has benefitted from being in that free society?
Just ask the folks in Hungary or (esp.) Russia what happens when all the independent media gets bought up by government sycophants: do you want to live in that kind of society?
That’s silly
I think you overestimate the influence of traditional media these days. CNN is a declining asset. Nobody under 60 gets their news from these places. Anyway, by the time the deal closes Trump will be in lamb duck status.
And the amount of debt being taken on for the deal is astronomical.
There is a post Trump world. These companies have to be financially successful in.
Exactly right, which is why I will bring up that the same company that will own WBD (cnn) will also own in major part Tiktok, which is exactly where younger people get their news.
I think this will work out nicely for Netflix. It overleverages their competition, putting them in a worse spot, and I suspect traditional media is going to be far less of an demand from a pure screen-time perspective in the next 10 years. Generative content is just starting to get good enough with Seedance 2 - the cost of creation is about to plumet.
Generative content is going to make things super weird with the following.
Theres TONS of 1950-1990 SciFi content. Lots of 1 off books, or trilogies. Really cool stories.
And generative video could get to the point where we can make those books into movies.
The weird place here is who owns the rights, and all that. And it coukd easily fall into an area like The Last Ringbearer is in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer
Epub free, because of weird rights issues with Tolkien estate. https://www.tenseg.net/press/lastringbearer
This is exactly what I'm hoping for. When these tools get to a certain level I'd love to see a TV adaptation of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
They loaded up 2 competitors with debt and got billions in return as a breakup fee. Not a bad strategy.
Are they truly over leveraged when the purchase is being backstopped by countries like Saudi Arabia that have unlimited funds? I feel like people said the same thing about the Twitter purchase being over leveraged and it looks like Musk is about to very successfully offload that entire debt bomb onto happy public investors via SpaceX. I think this could work out quite well for the Ellisons, Trumps and Saudis, this purchase really bulks up their media empire and increases their ability to control public opinion via all major forms of modern media (Streaming, Tiktok, 24 hour news networks).
Maybe running up the price was part of the point.
Paramount has a lot of problems right now, financially. Maybe Netflix plans to buy them both in the next few years after those issues come home to roost for Paramount.
Based on past owners of Warner Brothers, seems fairly likely in a few years. The value will be 1/10 of what it is today.
And when there is a different US administration.
I was looking forward to good UX accessing HBO through Netflix. Too bad, but looking forward to good UX accessing HBO, and paramount (?) some day down the line through Netflix when this converges.
After the Paramount & Warner merger it will be good if they launch a Criterion Collection type of thing with the outstanding back catalog, going in the other direction of streaming, and producing and selling good quality Blu ray hardware. In my dreams of course.
My guess is that they are looking forward to juicy licensing deals with OpenAI, Google or Meta for the rights to generate AI content featuring Batman, Harry Potter, and other characters in the WB stable.
No mention of Trump issuing insane threats against a Netflix board member and Netflix itself, in the story or the comments, because that is just normal now I guess.
Stages of grief. I am personally at "depression". America is over. Let's all watch some K-pop demon hunters!
(On a positive note conservatives are really terrible at art. They will always need the gays, communists, atheists and liberals to entertain them).
The Communists Have the Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvCGZEqk8Ak
Unfortunately Paramount will retain HBO, and auction off Discovery, which no one wants anyway.
Like buying Yahoo circa 2015...
Like buying Aol, circa 2000
The audience has already left and it's never, ever coming back.
Paramount wants CNN, which is currently under Discovery.
I literally do not understand this perspective. If that was true they would have let Netflix buy Warner Bros., which would have spun off CNN, and Skydance could have scooped it up for much much less money than buying the entirety of Warner Bros/discovery.
Paramount's financing package combines roughly $45–46 billion in equity with more than $57 billion in debt.
The deal values Warner Bros. Discovery at around $111 billion ($31 per share), and including WBD's existing debt, the total takeover comes to more than $110 billion. NBC News
It would be the largest leveraged buyout (LBO) in history, with $87 billion of total pro forma gross debt and an estimated gross leverage of approximately 7x 2026 EBITDA before synergies.
Seems like a poor decision driven by ego.
My question is: who is lending the money for these leveraged buyout deals? They seem to leave the lenders holding the bag at some point when it all implodes. Do these deals really pay off often enough to be worth financing them?
> who is lending the money for these leveraged buyout deals? They seem to leave the lenders holding the bag at some point when it all implodes. Do these deals really pay off often enough to be worth financing them?
For this deal, it is:
- ~$57b Debt financing: Bank of America, Citigroup, Apollo
- ~$46b Equity backing: Ellison's dad, RedBird Capital Partners
- Sovereign wealth funds on the equity side: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi
They keep financing these deals so they must be making money on them but there is so much value destruction in so many of these cases. Someone has to be left holding the bag of hot garbage in the end so who is taking the loss?
We know private equity offloads the debt onto the walking corpse and usually pays themselves huge fees and bonuses for their "assistance". So it is clear how they make money. I just don't get how the banks make out.
I’m so happy, because I collect movies and the idea of Netflix putting the entire WB catalog behind a subscription with no purchase option sounds awful to me.
I can't imagine Paramount doesn't ruin this.
So NF is just not matching or exceeding an elevated Paramount offer... But could WBD still choose the already on the table NF deal at the end of the day? I guess with the sort of statement that Netflix made though, it's likely WBD would not and realizes NF is just done at this point. Or maybe it's some sort of double bluff by NF? Hard to really know for sure.
It would not be in WBD shareholders interest to walk away from Paramount's overpayment. It is a great deal for WBD shareholders, but a poor financial outcome for Paramount. Netflix's discipline is noteworthy.
Like many things, phone OS, desktop OS, CPUs, GPUs, ride sharing, credit card payments, video game consoles, we are heading towards a Disney/Paramount duopoly
> we are heading towards a Disney/Paramount duopoly
Duopoly over what? Worldwide video entertainment?
paramount will disintegrate in due time.
Sure, right after twitter. Any moment now, lets just keep waiting.
CNN; Midterms
> CNN; Midterms
The deal won't be closed by then. You can expect it to take 12 - 18 months.
RIP Superman
"Truth, Justice, and the American Way" aren't dead yet.
They've always been dead for a segment of the population. And its the section of population "We" (royal) chose.
Unfortunately, We have exhausted the existing people we demolished. Now, who is being sacrificed is moving further up the economic foodchain with no real end in sight.
Are you sure?
I tell ya, if you lean left politically it sure feels like we’re taking a lot of fucking L’s.
Ah, yes, only if you don't recognize the game actually ended a while ago. This is the consequences phase, the left isn't impacting outcomes anymore.
Uhm, have you not seen recent electoral results...?
So the right wing takeover of all American media continues
Can this shit cake be undone by a federal judge? No way a merger like that doesn’t violate antitrust laws.
From https://nypost.com/2026/02/26/media/paramount-skydance-victo...
> Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos failed Thursday to convince a skeptical Trump administration to approve his proposed takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery – and with that, his nearly done deal to buy WBD’s streaming service and studio went into a death spiral.
Is this about the price of the deal or the administration not approving mergers that they think don’t align with right wing ideology?
This means CNN will now be controlled by Ellison. CNN will become another Fox news.
I know this comes up a lot, but if that were the case, they would’ve just waited for the split and bought the networks division.
I didn't say all they are interested in is turning CNN into another Fox news. It is just one of the outcomes.
I wrote the following comment 4 months ago when Larry Ellison bought Tiktok (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45267643 ). Reposting it here, verbatim since it is part of the same story (imo) and everything in it has been confirmed in the last 4 months except for the last paragraph. I guess we will find out eventually :
So Larry Ellison just took over Paramount group which is now looking to bid for Warner Brothers and CNN. And now Ellison is going to take over TikTok.
Paramount(being run by Larry Ellison's son) is looking to install the pro-israel-propagandist who has variously masqueraded as a liberal, a conservative and anti-woke free-speech champion, Bari Weiss[1] as CBS's editor-in-chief or co-president[2]. It also bears mentioning that Ellison is a life-long zionist, friend of the IDF and close personal friend of Netanyahu to whom he even offered a post at Oracle.[3]
This very much looks like a hostile take-over of the American mind by a tech billionaire who just overtook Elon Musk to become the world's richest man. People should be talking about whether they want to go through this all over again.
[1] - https://theintercept.com/2018/03/08/the-nyts-bari-weiss-fals...
[2] - https://archive.is/20250916040811/https://www.nytimes.com/20...
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Larry_Ellison&old...
Say "goodbye" to John Oliver, Erin Burnett, Abby Phillip, Anderson Cooper, and Fareed Zakaria to be replaced with Nick Fuentes and Tim Pool.
Easiest $2.8 billion made in history?
AT&T had to pay $4B for failure to acquire T-Mobile. T-Mobile used that money quite wisely.
“Win”