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afavour 10 hours ago [-]
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.
softwaredoug 9 hours ago [-]
State AGs play a role in anti trust enforcement. So it’s not over yet.
lapetitejort 9 hours ago [-]
When has a state AG successfully cancelled a merger? Did any state try to prevent Microsoft and Activision's merger?
When Feds are not involved, its harder for State AGs to win. Not impossible. And they can slow things down / get concessions.
howardYouGood 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
ls612 6 hours ago [-]
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.
afavour 5 hours ago [-]
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.
darth_avocado 9 hours ago [-]
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.
dyauspitr 60 minutes ago [-]
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.
programmertote 7 hours ago [-]
Is it rumor or true that Saudis or some middle eastern financiers are part of the Paramount bid?
> 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?
jsnell 8 hours ago [-]
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.
cyanydeez 9 hours ago [-]
As long as they get to keep a media alt-right afloat in politics, it doesn't matter their value.
HDThoreaun 9 hours ago [-]
The Ellisons have zero liquidity issues. Theyll sell off parts to cut costs but no chance they sell the stuff they actually want
mudil 9 hours ago [-]
I would not bet against RedBird and Ellisons.
andsoitis 9 hours ago [-]
One must.
feb012025 6 hours ago [-]
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...
throwaway290 34 minutes ago [-]
Saudis are sponsoring this
bananamogul 4 hours ago [-]
It really does not.
spiderfarmer 3 hours ago [-]
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.
mullingitover 9 hours ago [-]
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.
crazygringo 9 hours ago [-]
$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.
spiderfarmer 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
gloryjulio 4 hours ago [-]
It's more than the quarterly net income last year. So still quite a lot.
downrightmike 5 hours ago [-]
$2.8B is $2.8B
internet101010 9 hours ago [-]
Or just buy Paramount in a couple of years.
nutjob2 9 hours ago [-]
It's WB's back catalog that is the main prize.
add-sub-mul-div 9 hours ago [-]
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.
VonGuard 8 hours ago [-]
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!?
PacificSpecific 2 hours ago [-]
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.
underlipton 8 hours ago [-]
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).
bombcar 3 hours ago [-]
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.
bitwize 5 hours ago [-]
I remember GameTap. American McGee launched his game, American McGee's Grimm on that, for free afaik (or free for a limited time).
master_crab 9 hours ago [-]
Well, Netflix did succeed at making the Ellisons pay a large fortune for something that costs a small fortune.
dyauspitr 57 minutes ago [-]
That doesn’t matter. It’s a $100 billion to replace a lot of sane media with far right propaganda.
SilverElfin 7 hours ago [-]
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.
howardYouGood 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
dylan604 9 hours ago [-]
waits 20 minutes, cool, interest just covered whatever that extra was
PearlRiver 9 hours ago [-]
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.
throwaway5752 9 hours ago [-]
Now they can control millennial and younger minds by controlling what CNN broadcasts.
avtar 9 hours ago [-]
Young people are more into TikTok than CNN, and the Ellisons already control that in the U.S.
afavour 9 hours ago [-]
…young people don’t watch CNN.
llm_nerd 9 hours ago [-]
I feel like you're posting some humorous sarcasm and are being misunderstood.
throwaway5752 21 minutes ago [-]
You are correct. Maybe this is just a very dumb move Paramount and those funding this acquisition.
andsoitis 7 hours ago [-]
tick, tock
mystraline 6 hours ago [-]
Isnt that the golden round robot that needs wound up every so often?
(Crossing the chasm of Sar)
btian 9 hours ago [-]
Nobody watches CNN
jjcm 6 hours ago [-]
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.
nullocator 3 hours ago [-]
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).
mystraline 6 hours ago [-]
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
They loaded up 2 competitors with debt and got billions in return as a breakup fee. Not a bad strategy.
israrkhan 9 hours ago [-]
Paramount agreed to pay the $2.8 billion breakup fee that WBD would owe Netflix if that deal didn’t go through.
softwaredoug 9 hours ago [-]
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.
nullocator 3 hours ago [-]
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.
notTooFarGone 16 minutes ago [-]
But i can understand the sentiment: Why should a company fight this fight? They are not incentivized to overpay for politics of that caliber.
dylan604 9 hours ago [-]
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.
master_crab 9 hours ago [-]
Share price of Netflix jumped 10% after the news broke. Pretty sure shareholders will see a lot of upside.
lovich 9 hours ago [-]
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.
ZeroGravitas 1 hours ago [-]
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.
softwaredoug 10 hours ago [-]
Maybe running up the price was part of the point.
galleywest200 9 hours ago [-]
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.
softwaredoug 9 hours ago [-]
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.
nutjob2 9 hours ago [-]
And when there is a different US administration.
underlipton 8 hours ago [-]
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.
pentagrama 8 hours ago [-]
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.
elondaits 8 hours ago [-]
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.
anduril22 9 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately Paramount will retain HBO, and auction off Discovery, which no one wants anyway.
indigodaddy 9 hours ago [-]
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.
andsoitis 9 hours ago [-]
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.
hnburnsy 9 hours ago [-]
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
andsoitis 9 hours ago [-]
> we are heading towards a Disney/Paramount duopoly
Duopoly over what? Worldwide video entertainment?
ibero 9 hours ago [-]
paramount will disintegrate in due time.
nullocator 3 hours ago [-]
Sure, right after twitter. Any moment now, lets just keep waiting.
russianGuy83829 8 hours ago [-]
CNN; Midterms
andsoitis 7 hours ago [-]
> CNN; Midterms
The deal won't be closed by then. You can expect it to take 12 - 18 months.
zedlasso 9 hours ago [-]
RIP Superman
aaronbrethorst 9 hours ago [-]
"Truth, Justice, and the American Way" aren't dead yet.
mystraline 6 hours ago [-]
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.
nutjob2 9 hours ago [-]
Are you sure?
andsoitis 9 hours ago [-]
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.
xenadu02 9 hours ago [-]
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?
andsoitis 8 hours ago [-]
> 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
pupppet 4 hours ago [-]
I tell ya, if you lean left politically it sure feels like we’re taking a lot of fucking L’s.
nullocator 3 hours ago [-]
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.
etchalon 6 hours ago [-]
I can't imagine Paramount doesn't ruin this.
4 hours ago [-]
lateforwork 8 hours ago [-]
This means CNN will now be controlled by Ellison. CNN will become another Fox news.
cocacola1 8 hours ago [-]
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.
lateforwork 8 hours ago [-]
I didn't say all they are interested in is turning CNN into another Fox news. It is just one of the outcomes.
ulfw 5 hours ago [-]
So the right wing takeover of all American media continues
helaoban 9 hours ago [-]
Easiest $2.8 billion made in history?
mocheeze 8 hours ago [-]
AT&T had to pay $4B for failure to acquire T-Mobile. T-Mobile used that money quite wisely.
volleyball 10 minutes ago [-]
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.
> 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?
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.
When Feds are not involved, its harder for State AGs to win. Not impossible. And they can slow things down / get concessions.
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.
"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?
In a matter of months: Paramount, CBS, TikTok, CNN, FreePress...
They could arguably just build a better WB from scratch with that kind of money.
4 good long running series is all HBO needed to become successful, so they got a free HBO.
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!?
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.
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).
It is pretty clear that Trump wanted Paramount to win so it is smart for them to cut their losses.
(Crossing the chasm of Sar)
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
Paramount was about to go to idiotic lengths to get this. Netflix is willing to walk away.
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 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.
Duopoly over what? Worldwide video entertainment?
The deal won't be closed by then. You can expect it to take 12 - 18 months.
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.
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.
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
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...
> 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?