Maybe I’m just a Cynic, but this whole saga reads to me like one of the We are no longer bound by your puny Rules!!! indicators that come just before a major economic crash. Per the WSJ, “Six Months, 9 Offers and $81 Billion. How Hollywood’s Nasty Takeover Was Won” [unpaywalled version]
For six months, the son of one of the world’s richest men kept hearing the same unfamiliar word: No.
Even before he closed a deal to combine his company with a much bigger one, David Ellison was already plotting to do it again. Once his Skydance Media took control of Paramount, he turned his attention to a Hollywood icon, launching an audacious takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery that would give the Ellison family control of a sprawling media empire.
His first offer was swatted away. So were his second and third. By the time Ellison made his sixth offer, Warner Chief Executive Officer David Zaslav stopped responding to his texts. Even when Warner officially accepted a rival offer from Netflix, Ellison refused to take no for an answer.
As the battle dragged on, Ellison sweetened his offers, ratcheted up the pressure, took the hostile bid directly to shareholders, threatened a bruising proxy fight, brought in President Trump allies to lobby, and treated the existing term sheet like paper waiting to be shredded.
On the ninth offer, the wealth and influence of the Ellisons finally won…
And once Netflix dropped its own $72 billion deal for Warner’s studios and HBO Max streaming business, the scion of software billionaire Larry Ellison was poised to become one of the most powerful people in a town that once derided him as a nepo-baby.
Ellison, 43 years old, as Paramount chief executive will now control much of our attention: the shows we watch, the news we consume and the screens we stare at all day long, with a family portfolio that will include HBO, CNN, CBS News, the historic Warner Bros. studio lot and crown jewels such as DC Comics and Harry Potter.
As much as Ellison and his team had been telling anyone who would listen that his business would ultimately prevail in buying a company five times its size, the reaction on Friday from Hollywood to Washington to Wall Street was astonishment…
On Friday, Paramount paid a breakup fee of $2.8 billion to Netflix.
At NYMag, “Paramount Wins, Everybody Loses”:
Backed by his billionaire dad’s bankroll and the full support of many in Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, Paramount CEO David Ellison won the battle for Warner Bros. on Thursday, successfully quashing a surprise bid by Netflix to take over the storied movie and TV company. Ellison is no doubt celebrating his victory over the streaming powerhouse, ditto Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders who stand to gain from Paramount’s sweetened offer. But for everyone else, this deal feels like a colossal dud, one that will result in a new company burdened with billions more in debt — almost surely leading to thousands of layoffs, fewer movies and TV shows getting made, and the creation of a combined CBS News–CNN operation likely to lean well to the right of where either is now.
In fairness, Netflix closing a deal for Warner Bros. would have had numerous downsides too. Many in the film business, including notable figures such as director James Cameron, were vehemently opposed to the streamer getting its mitts on WB given its business model to date has had no real use for theatrical distribution. And as the Writers Guild told Vulture in December, “The problem is the acquisition and pending consolidation of two media giants, not who the buyer is.” Industry consolidation in this century, including Disney’s purchase of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox entertainment assets or Amazon’s gobbling up MGM, has rarely been good for everyday people. A Netflix “win” wouldn’t have been great news for the average viewer or moviegoer either.
But as one Warner Bros. veteran told me late last year, the Netflix bid felt very much like the “least worst option,” and I think that’s exactly right. For all the downsides the tech giant’s now-dead deal would have had, Paramount’s winning is the worst-case scenario for Hollywood — and America.
For one thing, workers in the industry, whether employees of Warner Bros. and Paramount or just creatives trying to set up new projects, will lose because Ellison won. Netflix would surely have ended up making some staff cuts, and while it had promised to let Warners keep making movies for theaters, I’m convinced the current Netflix film unit would have cut back on big-budget titles such as The Rip had the deal gone through, if only because Warners would have offered a consistent diet of such spectacles.
But while a Netflix-WB union would have resulted in a bit less money overall being spent on films, Par-WB figures to be a bloodletting. Just as Disney didn’t need 20th Century Fox to keep churning out as many movies once it took control of that studio, Ellison will quickly decide he doesn’t need to double his theatrical slate overnight. Or, as former New York contributor Nolan Hicks mused Thursday, “If anyone actually thinks the Paramount-WB combo is going to field a slate of [about] 40 movies a year, can I also interest you in buying the Brooklyn Bridge, which is also definitely for sale?”
Ellison’s supersize company will carry with it a supersize debt load — roughly $60 billion by some estimates. So in addition to scaling back on movie spending, Paramount-WB will need to slash costs like crazy. And unlike Netflix-WB, there are overlapping departments everywhere: two sets of cable-TV businesses, competing news divisions (CNN and CBS News), rival sports units, multiple marketing teams, competing sales staff, and on and on. Had the Netflix deal gone through, Warners was going to spin off most of its cable holdings, allowing those units to fend for themselves as NBCUniversal’s cast-offs at Versant are now doing. It wouldn’t have been easy, but folks at Warner-owned cable channels would have had a shot at keeping their jobs. The Paramount-WB cable combination will result in thousands of workers losing their jobs as back-office operations get smooshed together…
…[I]t’s hard to see much upside at all in the Paramount deal for Warners should it actually close. We will now have one fewer truly independent major studio making and distributing movies and TV shows. Thousands of workers will lose their jobs, and fewer creative voices will have a platform as the number of projects that get made shrinks still further. At best, less money will be devoted to covering the news and investigating wrongdoing; at worst, that news will be slanted further toward one political point of view. And at a time when the president of the United States and his cronies have embarked on a bid to make the country less democratic and less pluralistic, a media company that has shown a clear willingness to align itself with that mission is about to get dramatically bigger. If there were a worst-case scenario in what might happen to Warner Bros., this is it.
Paramount Skydance will combine Paramount+ and HBO Max into one streaming service, said company CEO David Ellison.
The announcement comes days after Paramount Skydance agreed to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, HBO’s parent company.— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost.com) March 2, 2026 at 12:45 PM
… He added that Paramount didn’t want to make changes to the HBO brand. “Our viewpoint is HBO should stay HBO,” Ellison said, noting that his favorite HBO product is “Game of Thrones.” If Justice Department regulators allow the deal to go through, it would place recent HBO Max hits, such as “The Pitt” and “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” alongside Paramount offerings including “South Park” and “Yellowstone.”…
Ellison is the son of Oracle co-founder and Trump ally Larry Ellison. His firm, Skydance, bought Paramount over the summer, putting CBS, Paramount Pictures and more under his control. The $8 billion deal was approved by the Trump administration following a lengthy review and several concessions.
The deal to buy Warner Bros., valued at about $110 billion, will almost surely attract regulatory scrutiny from the Justice Department because — without divestments — it places major swaths of the film, television and news industries under one roof: Warner Bros. and Paramount studios, HBO Max and Paramount+, and CBS and CNN would all have the same parent company. Ellison expressed confidence on the call that the deal wouldn’t face hurdles with regulators…
the Ellison media empire, even if they do manage to build it out, is an extremely fragile asset for the reactionary cause in several ways
for one, the commitment to the cause of those principals that are younger than 80 is uncertain
for two, there's not much evidence they're good at this— post malone ergo propter malone (@proptermalone.bsky.social) February 27, 2026 at 4:52 AM
yeah there's imo some real tension between the "they will have to consume what we give them" posture and the absolute explosion in content generation pathways
— post malone ergo propter malone (@proptermalone.bsky.social) February 27, 2026 at 5:03 AM
this probably is cope: I think it is more likely that Team Ellison eats the $7b breakup fee for nothing when the WB deal is blocked than that the deal is consummated
— post malone ergo propter malone (@proptermalone.bsky.social) February 27, 2026 at 8:12 AM
In all probability a few years from now Ted will either scoop up WB for a significant discount and/or pick apart the useful pieces of the failed Ellison media empire for peanuts.
— foggydrinker.bsky.social (@foggydrinker.bsky.social) February 27, 2026 at 8:17 AM
Yeah, everyone is very much overlooking that Murdoch got rich doing media because, for better or worse, he was good at it.
Bezos/Ellison buying media companies as vanity projects is a very different thing
PARAMOUNT DOWNGRADED TO JUNK BY FITCH; RATINGS ON NEG. WATCH
— Blurry TV Headlines (@blurrytvheadlines.numbergoup.com) March 2, 2026 at 6:33 PM
Private Equity gonna do to Star Trek, Batman, and HBO what they did to Toys R Us, Sears and RadioShack
is it “because we got almost three billion dollars out of folding and faillison is likely to have to spin off properties we want within five years?”
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) March 2, 2026 at 6:33 PM
Just thinking about how, before buying Paramount, Ellison's time at Skydance was so mid-to-bad that Paramount executives had to tell him that his taste in movies is garbage. www.vulture.com/article/larr…
— James Downie (@jamescdownie.bsky.social) March 2, 2026 at 8:43 PM
Paramount President Jeff Shell was fired by Comcast in 2023 over sexual harassment allegations. Now he's facing a lawsuit over insider trading related to recent Paramount deals (like their $7.7 billion deal to exclusive MMA broadcast rights).
really a wonderful collection of human beings— Karl Bode (@karlbode.com) March 2, 2026 at 1:45 PM
Paramount should enjoy its growing news monopoly while they have it because when Democrats win back power we are going to break up these anti-democratic information conglomerates. All of them.
— Chris Murphy (@chrismurphyct.bsky.social) February 27, 2026 at 1:01 PM
Another Win for Democracy Docket
Baud
Seems like a good time to begin creating a new American culture.
Martin
California is almost certain to block this. We’ll see if USSC allows them to do so.
MattF
I saw a rant the other day from an ex-Oracle employee. Memorably, he noted that one should not commit the error of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison.
PaulWartenberg
I saw someone on Bluesky point out how much debt Ellison et al are taking on to pull this takeover.
The selloff of many key franchises are likely to ensue.
I hope Obama can buy up Star Trek.
pluky
Nice to see that Ellison fils has mastered the douche bro sneer.
PaulWartenberg
By the way, Bluesky is crashing on me. Anybody else having issues?
Steve Paradis
Jeebus. Maybe if you give a Lifetime Oscar to David for his performance in Flyboys, he’ll retire and fly his plane around.
MattF
@pluky: Resting Bro Face.
Baud
@PaulWartenberg:
I was able to log on ok.
me
@MattF: Brian Cantrill. He later made a rant comparing the Oracle takeover of Sun to the invasion of Poland.
“in fact as I have said before I emphatically believe that if you have to explain the Nazis to someone who had never heard of World War 2 but was an Oracle customer there’s a very good chance that you would explain the Nazis in Oracle allegory.”
Matt McIrvin
*Is* there an explosion in content generation pathways? Sure, anyone can put anything they want on the open Internet, but if it doesn’t belong to the big platforms, nobody will look at it. And the bad guys are snapping all of those up. I guess it’s a question of how fast the market responds to the big platforms being corrupted and filled with propaganda.
dmsilev
I wonder how much of Ellison senior’s net worth is tied up in Oracle shares. Because they’ve been spending money like water on AI related ….stuff, and unlike e.g. Google, Oracle isn’t paying for it out of cash but instead through debt. And if that bubble pops, Ellison senior might have a wee bit of a cashflow problem funding his failson’s project.
JaySinWA
@PaulWartenberg: Bluesky is flakey for me in the last hour or so. Apparently punishing me trying to snark about about Mullin and Oklahoma not sending their best
ETA I probably should do more hintelectual content in general.
Baud
Trump will probably guarantee the debt.
Kelly
@PaulWartenberg: Works fine for me. Here’s this afternoon’s post with pic of Daisy, hoping we’ll play soon
bsky.app/profile/northsantiam.bsky.social/post/3mg6wmnujjk26
Redshift
I have no special knowledge of the business, but an opinion that rang true to me is that all of these media mergers only make sense as operations to game the corrupt Trump regulators. As a business afterward, they only work if you believe Trumpism will be our government long term. If the new Thousand Year Reich… isn’t, they’ll crash and burn.
Matt
@Matt McIrvin: At least part of the trick is for independent voices to keep moving. So, e.g., there are many independent voices on Substack right now— but I don’t know what the Substack management looks like or whether they are about to be bought out.
MattF
Posting to restore my nym. #17 is mine.
Baud
I bet Kirk Cameron and Kevin Sorbo are excited.
JaySinWA
@Kelly: Your link is not working for me. I just get the frame and blank lines for posts.
ETA and now it is working again for the moment.
ETA 2 broken again now says “Unable to connect” ,,,
Kelly
@JaySinWA: Weird. At least 3 other people have seen it OK. Got some likes :-)
Elizabelle
I hope the Ellisons go down in their private jet. And know that it’s falling.
And have Bari Weiss on board too.
Terrible, ugly people.
JaySinWA
@Kelly: BlueSky’s intermittant for me.
Gravenstone
That fucking privileged sneer gives him the very definition of a punchable face.
JeffH
@dmsilev: Yup, Oracle is all in on “AI” and in a very interesting state because of it. While Ed Zitron is hardly neutral on these matters, his description of the situation paints a very bleak picture for Oracle. That being said, when all this falls apart the collateral damage is going to be massive.
lowtechcyclist
I miss the days when antitrust laws actually meant something.
Mai Naem mobile
I read somewhere the last of the debt taken on for this takeover is junk status. Doesn’t come across like sound business decisions.
narya
The thing is, “good story, well-told” is always gonna be the way to go, not reinvention this, bro-ing that. Anyone who blathers on about sweeping changes (implying they’re the only one who could have thought it up) is, imho, a dolt.
YY_Sima Qian
Well, it’s predictable that the transition from plutocracy to kleptocracy would be accelerated in the age of Trump.
The US economy is an oligarchy through & through.
SFAW
When I was young(er), working in high tech, I used to hate Microsoft and Bill Gates (and Ballmer, too, but not Paul Allen) enough that I was a Larry Ellison … supporter, maybe? Not a fanboi, but Ellison was the anti-MS, so …
Then I matured a little, and realized that Ellison was scum. I was a little ashamed/embarrassed, but not enough to say 1000 Ave Marias and 1000 Pater nosters. And his being a RWMF only added to my shame. And now that his asshole scion is prepping to create Amerikanskiy Pravda, well …
As the oft-missed efgoldman would say: Fuck ’em.
Baud
I vaguely remember that people were relieved because she was one of the less extremist cabinet picks.
Searcher
@PaulWartenberg: That a $15B company can buy a $70B company in an all cash deal for $111B with something like $50B in debt is an indictment of American capitalism, regardless of whether the deal goes through.
Old School
@Mai Naem mobile:
It might have been this post.
XeckyGilchrist
I love the “you must watch TV and now we own you” attitude. I do watch a bunch of TV but if the only shows available are RWNJ garbage I’ll find something else to do
Sister Golden Bear
@XeckyGilchrist:
It’s very much the enterprise software CEO mindset. You’ll use the half-ass, half-broken, difficult to use software we give you, and you’ll like it. Or else.
Gin & Tonic
@pluky: I don’t want to be a looks-ist, but that face on the right in the top photo is screaming “punch me!”
Elizabelle
Junior looks like Stupid Billy Idol.
Ruviana
@Gin & Tonic: I regret judging people based on looks but the younger Mr. Ellison is one of the most unattractive people I have ever seen. I feel similarly about Eric Trump.
Other MJS
As a Trek fan, I’m disappointed and conflicted.
MagdaInBlack
@Gin & Tonic: I feel like that may have happened a few times.
Booger
Well I’m old enough to own a LOTR DVD that opens with an AOL Time Warner logo. Boy that AOL Time Warner sure was a media powerhouse, wunnit?
Matt McIrvin
@Redshift:
They hope they have enough control over the thought of the people that they can make it a Thousand Year Reich.
Aziz, light!
@Other MJS: I’ve been a Trekkie since 1967 but Paramount has ruined Trek for me with cheesy writing, cheesier characters, and the same old rehashed, unimaginative story arcs. Oh well.
Gretchen
@pluky: You’re so very right! You can see that he’s a spoiled rich douche from a mile away.
anotherlurker
The more I hear of the obscenely rich, the more I’m convinced that those who hit the $200,000,000,000 mark in net worth must immediately be fed thru a wood chipper and mixed with last year’s haul of Autum leaves. The resulting compost to be used as bio-fuel for needy communities.
Maybe this way, they could actually do something for society.
Before any outraged comments are directed to this comment, be advised: This is my Modest Proposal. (Get it?)
Another Scott
@XeckyGilchrist: +1
We don’t have Netflix and only recently signed up for Acorn as our only streaming payment. I think the only show J watches on CBS is the Matlock reboot. She mainly watches Tennis. I only glance at whatever she has on.
I’ve wondered for years how people find the time to watch shows on half a dozen streaming subscriptions, sportsball subscriptions, and on and on. :-/
In this case, I assume the banksters win – and get paid up-front – either way. They make money on the mergers, they make money on breaking the leviathans up and selling off the parts. Of course, foreign money is playing a big part on this proposed purchase – $24B of the total is coming from Middle East sovereign wealth funds. The MotUs always use Other People’s Money even when they have too much of their own, because, hey, why risk having to actually personally pay for something…
Grr…
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Billd
This is season 7 of The Guilded Age.
JML
Whatever you might think about Netflix, there’s no question that Ted Sarandos knows what he’s doing. I might not like the way they treat theatres as a failed business model, but they absolutely handled the transition from mail order to streaming very well and are a powerhouse. Skydance has only shown an ability to bully their way through mergers backed by billionaire politics, not actual good decision-making and an ability to handle their media empire well.
Overpaying for WB through debt financing over pride and politics is pretty damn stupid, and Netflix is going to make a tidy profit off of them, which they could even use to pick up some of the spin-offs at a discount rate. (Just wait until the Skydance crew can’t actually spin off some of the cable properties for anywhere near the sale prices they’re anticipating, because smart people know that the cable model is wobbly AF)
Ugh. Hate these clowns.
Paul in KY
I have no idea who the dude on the right is in that picture, but he just screams out ‘raging asshole’. Has the ‘Backpfeifengesicht’ face. In fact his picture should be in the definition of that word.