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Netflix’s pending mega-deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery is getting a lot of pushback in and outside of Hollywood, with a number of critics and experts saying that it could reshape or harm the entertainment industry in myriad ways. And the fight is far from over: Paramount Skydance is attempting a hostile takeover of WBD to block the deal. The war for Warners also has some pretty serious political implications, considering all the antitrust concerns, and because President Trump says he expects to be involved and both sides are vying for his favor. That includes Paramount’s Larry and David Ellison, longtime Trump allies and who have already lined up Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners as one of their financial backers. How much regulation any deal is ultimately subject to and how much Trump intervenes remains to be seen; below is some collected commentary, reporting, and analysis on how that side of the saga might play out.
David Ellison was trying to turn Trump officials against the Netflix deal ahead of time
As the New York Post reported last week:
Ellison met with Trump officials and key lawmakers in Washington DC on Wednesday to press his case against Warner Bros. Discovery’s potential selection of Netflix as its merger partner – even as the streaming giant submitted a higher offer in the latest round of bidding, The Post has learned. …
Ellison was in Washington with his legal team headed by Makan Delrahim, Trump’s former DOJ antitrust chief, sources said. They underscored in conversations with Trump officials and lawmakers in Congress why Netflix’s proposed deal to acquire its Warner Bros. studio and HBO Max streaming service should be throttled on antitrust grounds, sources said.
And he pitched big appeasing changes at CNN
Per the Wall Street Journal:
During a visit to Washington in recent days, David Ellison offered assurances to Trump administration officials that if he bought Warner, he’d make sweeping changes to CNN, a common target of President Trump’s ire, people familiar with the matter said. Trump has told people close to him that he wants new ownership of CNN as well as changes to CNN programming.
Ellison did not make any firm promises but people involved said it was made clear that, under Paramount’s ownership, CBS and CNN would not be acting as what some Republicans perceive as a “branch of the [media] resistance” against Trump. Another person familiar with Paramount’s pitch said the Ellisons saw CNN as a useful card to play to try to win WBD, by swaying Trump to support its offer. “CNN is politically toxic in the US and they saw themselves as the group that could solve that,” the person said. “Trump doesn’t care about streaming; he cares about CNN. Paramount needed CNN in the deal, everyone else wanted it out.”
Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos did his Trump homework, too
CNN’s Brian Stelter explains how Sarandos has been courting Trump’s favor:
Sarandos forged a personal relationship with Trump shortly after the 2024 election, a person familiar with the matter told CNN.
The two men had a long, friendly dinner at Mar-a-Lago in December 2024. That meant Sarandos had an open line of communication to Trump when Netflix entered the bidding war for Warner Bros. and HBO.
Sarandos flew to Washington and met with Trump in the Oval Office last month, the source said, confirming an earlier report by Bloomberg.
Trump then confirmed the Sarandos meeting during a Q&A with reporters on the red carpet of the Kennedy Center Honors – an event he hosted, underscoring his interest in all things Hollywood.
The president said he has a “lot of respect” for Sarandos and alluded to a first-name-basis relationship: “Ted has really done a legendary job.”
But he also referenced the antitrust concerns at issue, saying the combined market share of Netflix and HBO could be a problem.
The only thing that matters is whether Trump personally approves
TPM’s Josh Marshall highlights how this is all just how business is now done in Donald Trump’s America:
In its public pitch, [Paramount Skydance] has openly advertised to shareholders that it is the better acquirer because the Ellisons are tight with Trump, and the White House will never let a Netflix deal go through. Trump, in comments [Sunday], as much as agreed.
Trump has refashioned antitrust oversight to be little more than a personal veto for the Trump family. Friends can do mergers; foes can’t. Indeed, the indifferent and uncommitted can’t either. You need to get right with the Trump family.
When you ask why so much of corporate America is beholden to Trump now, this is why. A big diversified corporation simply cannot compete and thus, in practice, can’t exist with a determinedly hostile administration.
Can anybody beat the Ellisons at cozying up to Trump?
Puck’s Matthew Belloni is doubtful:
Trump says he wants Warners to go to the “highest bidder” and that he’s now “neutral” on who buys what. Please, stop laughing and crying. Has Trump ever been neutral on anything? It must be maddening for Ellison and the Netflix guys to know that the president will likely determine whether government regulators hold up their deal via litigation. It’s hard to believe Larry Ellison’s long-term relationship (and campaign dollars) won’t ultimately win the president’s support—and perhaps a directive to Attorney General Pam Bondi to leave a Paramount-Warners deal alone. David is said to have made promises of “sweeping changes” at CNN if Paramount takes over, and Larry reportedly called Trump to complain about the Netflix winning bid. You don’t do that unless you expect some kind of thumb to be applied to the scale on your behalf. And with Jared Kushner’s fund participating in the Ellison bid, Trump will have a rooting family interest as well. The president has shown over and over that he will insert himself into situations to extract something for himself, politically or financially. Why would this process be any different—especially after Ellison opened the door to meddling with the Paramount acquisition?
Unless David Ellison is in over his head
Semafor’s Rohan Goswami says Ellison may be miscalculating:
Paramount’s hostile bid — one of the largest ever — is more about ego than strict book analysis. “We’re really here to finish what we started,” the younger Ellison told CNBC Monday morning. “We put the company in play.” Ellison, reasonably, feels jilted by Warner, a company whose present $82 billion value is entirely thanks to a bidding war that Paramount kicked off and which Netflix won out.
Paramount is seeking to wildly overpay, a 140% premium, for a vanity asset — one that will give it real scale and influence in the streaming business, to be sure, but also goes a long way towards making David Ellison a real media mogul.
But their bet on having a firm ally in the White House appears to have over-read the transactional nature of a Washington in which insiders thrive, but outsiders should be careful about taking the president for granted.
Or he pisses off Trump
The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger warns against taking the president’s support for granted:
[T]he court politics can cut both ways. Trump loves being sucked up to, and he loves distributing head-pat rewards to the suck-ups. What Trump does not love is powerful people starting to treat those rewards as something they’ve earned. The largesse of the emperor is never earned—it is freely bestowed by his gracious will and graciously received by the unworthy! The baldness of Ellison’s pitch seems to have rankled at least some in Trump’s orbit, who offered some real howlers of complaint to Semafor: The Paramount team seems to “believe the worst tropes” about corruption in the administration, they groused. They’re “leaning into all the stereotypes.”
Where did those tropes and stereotypes come from, one wonders?
Ellison’s brazenness may have complicated Trump’s decision tree, but there’s little question the president is still the guy whose say-so will be final.
“In a normal administration, maybe the president would actually have [control of the deal], but he’d never say anything. He’d probably just, like, wink and nod—‘Well, we’ll let the enforcers do what the enforcers do’—and then not claim responsibility,” an administration official familiar with antitrust issues told The Bulwark. “In this administration, the president wants responsibility and wants everyone to know that he blocked the deal or whatever… . If the president is dictating, he’s gonna get what he wants. So we’ll see what he wants.”
Paramount also has a 60 Minutes problem
Trump is a volatile guy who is prone to sweeping asides and sudden outbursts — and that makes him a potentially fickle ally. Team Paramount couldn’t have been happy to see Trump reaction to Sunday’s 60 Minutes, which featured an interview with his newfound nemesis Marjorie Taylor Greene. In his Truth Social response, Trump took direct aim at the company:
My real problem with the show, however, wasn’t the low IQ traitor, it was that the new ownership of 60 Minutes, Paramount, would allow a show like this to air. THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP, who just paid me millions of Dollars for FAKE REPORTING about your favorite President, ME! Since they bought it, 60 Minutes has actually gotten WORSE.
And they a foreign money problem
Status’s Oliver Darcy notes that WBD seems to have balked at Paramount’s foreign financial partners:
A person familiar with the company’s thinking told Status that beyond feeling Paramount was light on price in comparison to Netflix, the company harbored “real concerns” about the “certainty of their financing” and “around some of the funding actors, namely the sovereign wealth funds.” And while Ellison didn’t identify any partners during his lengthy CNBC appearance, Paramount disclosed in an SEC filing that its backers include the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi—in addition to Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners.
The company attempted to downplay those concerns, noting the funds “have agreed to forgo any governance rights,” including board seats. Still, the involvement of those states raised plenty of eyebrows. Beyond presumably wanting more films shot on their soil (“The White Lotus, Riyadh,” anyone?), one wonders how such ownership might affect CNN’s editorial posture. At minimum, it would be highly unusual for a global news outlet to count as a part-owner a government that, not long ago, ordered the brutal execution of an American journalist.
It would also be quite the turn of events for the son-in-law of a president to have a stake in the news network that he has villainized for the last decade as the “enemy of the people.” Ellison on Monday acknowledged that he had spoken with Trump about his plans for CNN—a remarkable disclosure that raises a host of questions. While he didn’t detail what the two had discussed, it’s not too hard to guess. Trump would surely like to see the network cover him much more favorably and Ellison has already moved to make changes sure to delight Trump at CBS News, installing the anti-woke, anti-D.E.I. Bari Weiss as its editor-in-chief. Should Ellison succeed in acquiring WBD, he would surely implement similar changes at CNN, softening the network’s coverage of the president even more so than it has been toned down under Zaslav.
Would blue states try to intervene against Paramount?
Some experts told Bloomberg that was a definite possibility:
Democratic-led states like New York and California could throw up roadblocks for Paramount, said Harold Feld, senior vice president for consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge. “Whether or not DOJ steps up, I think the states will look at this very carefully,” Feld said in an interview after Paramount’s initial offer in October. “What they’ll be looking at is overlap in program production and streaming to see where there’s likely to be anticompetitive harm.”
Feld also noted that a deal would also have to secure consent in Europe and the UK, where he said antitrust authorities tend to define relevant markets more broadly.
Meanwhile Netflix has a MAGA influencer problem
As the Washington Post reports, many of Trump’s allies see Netflix as their culture war enemy:
“This is all about the Obamas taking over media,” activist Jack Posobiec wrote on X, pointing to a deal Netflix struck in 2018 with Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, Higher Ground.
In a post that has been reshared nearly 10,000 times on Elon Musk’s social media platform, conservative podcaster Benny Johnson called Netflix’s $83 billion deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery “the most dangerous media consolidation in American history.” He suggested that “the Democrat super-donors that run Netflix will now own a monopoly on children’s entertainment.”
The right-wing chorus, which includes Trump’s self-described “loyalty enforcer” Laura Loomer, has also focused on Susan Rice, Obama’s former national security adviser and U.N. ambassador, who sits on the streaming giant’s board of directors.
And what if a Netflix loss is a net gain?
Slate’s Andrew Harding makes a case for rooting for Netflix to fail:
Netflix buying Warner Bros. does nothing to stop the Ellisons from buying CNN. Pop culture can be very effective propaganda, but control of news networks is arguably a much more straightforward way to get there.
This is why there’s a compelling case that the Netflix deal ends up being the worst-case scenario here. If you love theatrical releases, you’ll probably get fewer. If you’re concerned about Big Tech monopolies, you’re watching one start to take off. And if you’re concerned about billionaires with agendas owning big chunks of the news industry, Netflix isn’t here to help.
Paramount Skydance will be fighting this acquisition tooth and nail, including on antitrust grounds. There’s a real possibility that Trump’s Federal Trade Commission shoots it down, maybe even for ideological reasons. But ask yourself this: If Lina Khan were still in charge, might you want her to do the same thing? Maybe Trump will shut down this deal for personal reasons—and maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing in the end if he does.
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