Last week Netflix announced a $82.7 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers, elbowing out rival acquisition bids (for now) by Comcast/NBC and Paramount/CBS. But the deal still needs regulatory approval from Trump, who has already stated several times that he’d prefer it if his bestie new owner of CBS, right wing billionaire Larry Ellison, comes away victorious.
Even before the deal was finalized, Paramount and/or the Trump administration had begun seeding complaints in Republican-friendly media that the bidding process was unfair to Larry Ellison and CBS/Paramount, and that the Trump administration is concerned about the antitrust impact of a Netflix Warner Brothers combination.
Now Paramount has announced that it’s trying to appeal directly to shareholders with a $108 billion hostile takeover bid:
“The tender offer is for $30 per share, all in cash, a contrast to Netflix’s offer, which is a $27.75 mix of cash and some stock, with shareholders also getting a stake in the linear TV spinout. Netflix is also only buying WBD’s streaming and studios business, while Paramount is pursuing the whole company, making for a complicated comparison, depending on how you value the linear TV business.”
Curiously omitted from Paramount’s press release is the fact that the $108 billion bid includes money from Jared Kushner’s private equity firm Affinity Partners, as well as funding from Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and Qatar. This is pretty clearly part of the Ellison family bid to dominate the entirety of U.S. media after their successful acquisition of CBS and Paramount.
If that’s not clear enough: one of the president’s top billionaire donors and son in law are working alongside Saudi Arabia and other foreign autocrats in a bid to dominate the shitty remnants of U.S. mainstream media. It sounds hyperbolic and alarmist when you say it out loud, but it’s no less true.
If you read this recent profile piece on Paramount’s new executives under Larry and David Ellison, you walk away with the sense that they’re kind of assholes. The kind of men who loathe actual creatives, don’t understand what “no” means, and are mostly interested in a company that builds lowest-common denominator engagement bait barfed from the dreams a dim 12-year-old boy trapped in 1989.
To be clear, any media consolidation, including a Netflix acquisition of Warner Brothers, is likely bad for the sector, consumers, and labor. The huge debt accumulated from these deals always involves a ton of layoffs, corner cutting, quality erosion, and price hikes as the remaining company tries to dig out from under the debt while still providing Wall Street its demand for impossible quarterly growth.
The correct antitrust play here, which wouldn’t happen under either U.S. political party (but is even less likely under Trump), is to put an end entirely to harmful, pointless consolidation to protect labor, consumers, and market competition, and to viciously protect independent, diverse media ownership.
But in a country too corrupt to engage with serious antitrust enforcement, of the three bidders for Warner Brothers, Netflix is likely the least bad option.
They’ve historically been the least lodged up the Trump administration’s colon (though that will change as they curry favor for regulatory approval), and their lack of as many redundant business units means there theoretically should be fewer layoffs.
Ellison ownership of CBS, CNN, HBO, Warner Brothers, Paramount, and a part of TikTok could prove to be significantly more problematic. And not just because of consolidation. The Trump administration and Ellison clearly want to build an authoritarian-friendly propaganda machine propped up by its infotainment arm. Think Fox News and Fox, but somehow worse and even less ethical.
They’re following the media domination playbook seen in other authoritarian-led countries like Hungary. Consolidate and acquire everything, and steadily replace already shaky journalism with gibberish and agitprop ahead of efforts to permanently retain power. The only upside here is that many of these zealots and nepobabies may not have the competency to pull it off.
The Netflix Warner Brothers bid includes a $5.8 billion breakup fee, suggesting that Netflix is likely to fight tooth and nail against any hostile takeover bids or any sort of strange, pro-Ellison shenanigans by the Trump administration and its Saudi allies (which as we noted last week, were going to be all but guaranteed in the months and weeks to come).
The hostile takeover bid guarantees months or years of legal fighting. But it also guarantees months of performative bullshit by Trump, Ellison, Kushner and right wing media about how Netflix ownership would be a woke antitrust nightmare, but letting the Saudis, Larry Ellison and his nepobaby son David dominate U.S. media would be a delightful, populist spritzer.
Expect a lot of shitty establishment corporate journalism on this that normalizes and helps prop up the phony gambit by Ellison and Trump. And a lot of kayfabe from all of these authoritarian-enabling assholes, suddenly pretending they appreciate “robust regulatory scrutiny” and a “healthy debate on market impacts based on the merits,” despite having a violent disdain for both.
But if Netflix truly digs in and doubles down (again probably the best of a bunch of bad options), it’s a fight that could outlast an unhealthy Trump and his increasingly unpopular administration entirely.
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