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.
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.
This was a much more compelling argument 14-odd months ago. People don’t like the politics of Paramount’s ownership because they’re aligned with the authoritarians currently trying to take control of the country - this isn’t a dispute over tax policy.
Is this before or after Ellison et co gut the news side of the organization to create another Fox New / RT? We've already seen what happened with 60 Minutes and CBS News:
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/29/bari-weiss-c...
* https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/01/26/inside-bari-we...
When push comes to shove, he'll follow the money. If Republicans lose the midterms, CBS will start shifting back to the middle to regain the millions of viewers it lost to NBC and ABC since Weiss took over and Weiss will probably be looking for a new job.
Choosing not to jump aboard all the insane modern woke politics doesn’t make you some scary right winger.
She could only help a legacy news outfit in my opinion.
At the end of the day, you have to draw attention to make money.
"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?
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!?
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).
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.
Let's not forget that Warner Brothers has been a bit of an albatross and never made money for anyone, that's why it's passed through so many different hands. Time, AoL Discovery to name a few.
Now Paramount are going to be sitting there with a mountain of debt, while Netflix and Disney are relatively debt free and very profitable and cash generative.
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.
How does one build a back catalogue going back decades, including things like Casablanca, Superman/Batman, Harry Potter, and V for Vendetta?
It is pretty clear that Trump wanted Paramount to win so it is smart for them to cut their losses.
In a matter of months: Paramount, CBS, TikTok, CNN, FreePress...
Paramount was about to go to idiotic lengths to get this. Netflix is willing to walk away.
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.
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.
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
(On a positive note conservatives are really terrible at art. They will always need the gays, communists, atheists and liberals to entertain them).
Like buying Aol, circa 2000
The audience has already left and it's never, ever coming back.
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
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.
> 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?
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...
