We’ve noted how Larry Ellison, as part of his attempt to control the entirety of media, had launched a $108 million hostile takeover bid for Warner Brothers. Larry, as we’ve seen with CBS and his interest in TikTok, is trying to convert what’s left of U.S. media into a giant safe space for affluent right wing autocrats and the right wing culture war grievance and infotainment complex.
In his way sits Netflix, which had already struck its own $82.7 billion deal with Warner Bros. The Warner Brothers board has consistently supported the Netflix deal as the safer option, and this week rejected the CBS/Paramount/Ellison family hostile takeover bid.
While the Ellison deal is higher, Warner’s board is concerned with a few things. One, that Larry Ellison isn’t fully using his own cash to fully back the bid, which could create chaos when it’s time to actually get the money together:
“Warner Bros has raised doubts about Paramount’s financial condition and creditworthiness. The offer relies on a seven-party, cross-conditional structure, with the Ellison Revocable Trust providing just 32% of the required equity commitment while capping its liability at $2.8 billion, Warner Bros said. It noted that the trust’s assets could be withdrawn at any time.”
The Warner board is also nervous that the involvement of Saudi money in the hostile takeover attempt could generate more national security regulatory heat than they’d like, further complicating a deal. In total, they see Netflix as the cleaner, easier, and more predictable path.
The wild card is Trump’s close ties to Ellison, which Trump has spent the last week trying to pretend don’t exist. Ellison has directly promised Trump he’ll take a hatchet to CNN’s occasionally semi-critical coverage of him, and our kakistocracy has some animosity toward Netflix for things like their occasional tendency to include homosexuals in military dramas.
What happens next? Well, Netflix has already begun kissing Trump’s ass in the hopes of regulatory approval, and I suspect you’ll see Netflix executives debase themselves repeatedly and creatively in the new year to appease the President.
If that’s not enough to satiate Donald’s ego, then I suspect you’ll see his DOJ launch a fake antitrust, fake populist intervention sometime in the new year trying to scuttle the deal and redirect the assets back to Ellison so he can continue his goal of creating autocrat-friendly state television leveraging the combined assets of CNN, HBO, CBS, and TikTok (if the Chinese give their approval).
This will be validated and normalized in the press (and by useful idiots like Matt Stoller) as a serious thing and an example of good faith populism, but it’s going to be cronyistic bullshit. Much like we saw when the first Trump administration launched a clumsy blockade of the AT&T Time Warner deal because Rupert Murdoch was mad that nobody would let him buy CNN.
Again, none of this will be reported clearly or honestly by the corporate American press, whose ownership has zero interest in journalism that’s critical of mindless consolidation or their pathetic groveling in the face of authoritarianism. Ideally a functioning government (which we don’t have) would block all media consolidation, but Netflix remains the better of a slate of bad options moving forward.
Netflix has fewer redundancies that would possibly mean potentially fewer layoffs. And they’re slightly less lodged up Donald’s colon (though they’re going to test that thesis to gain approval). And while they’ll certainly fire people and generate plenty of homogenized slop post acquisition, that’s still somehow a better option than letting Donald Trump and his autocrat friends flesh out their dream of state television.
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