"Merger Madness": Trump at Center of Rival Netflix-Paramount Bids for Warner Bros.
President Donald Trump says he will be personally involved in the potential sale of Warner Bros. Discovery, with two enormous buyout offers on the table that risk further exacerbating U.S. media concentration. Netflix announced an $83 billion deal last week to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, which would give the tech giant control of the Warner Bros. movie studio and rival streaming service HBO Max. Paramount Skydance then launched a hostile takeover bid worth $108 billion that would create a Hollywood behemoth and bring CBS News and CNN under the same roof, in addition to a host of other media properties. Paramount Skydance is controlled by the pro-Trump billionaires Larry Ellison and his son David; the takeover offer is also backed financially by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, as well as the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and Qatar. Media critics and anti-monopoly advocates have warned that both offers for Warner Bros. should be rejected by federal regulators, though the Trump administration has largely ended aggressive antitrust enforcement.
“We have these giant companies trying to take control of even more of what we watch, see, hear and read every day,” says Craig Aaron, the co-CEO of Free Press and Free Press Action, two media reform organizations. He calls the media giants’ efforts to woo Trump “a Mafia-type situation” and warns that previous media mega-mergers have been “disastrous” for workers, consumers and the businesses themselves.