President Donald Trump said he’s withholding judgment about whether Paramount Skydance‘s hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery or Netflix‘s deal with WBD should prevail.
At a White House briefing with reporters Monday, Trump was asked if he supports Paramount’s takeover bid for WBD. The president responded, “I don’t now enough about it. I know the companies very well. I know what they are doing. But I have to see. I have to see what percentage of market [share] they have. We have to see the Netflix percentage of market [share], Paramount percentage of market [share]. I mean, none of them are particularly great friends of mine. You know, I want to do what’s right. It’s so very important to do what’s right.”
Trump’s comments came just hours after David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance launched a direct-to-shareholders hostile takeover effort for WBD, offering $30 per share in an offer with an enterprise value of $108.4 billion. That came after Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery announced an $83.7 billion agreement, under which the streamer would buy WB’s studios, HBO, HBO Max and games divisions.
Paramount’s all-cash offer is backed by Larry Ellison, the wealthy father of Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison; RedBird Capital Partners; the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi; and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners investment company. Kushner is Donald Trump’s son-in-law, married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka.
Trump, asked if Kushner’s involvement in the Paramount bid would affect the president’s opinion, said, “I’ve never spoken with him” about Paramount’s WBD deal.
Trump, who has exerted control over federal agencies, said he will be participating in the government review of the Netflix-WB deal.
On Sunday, standing on the red carpet for the Kennedy Center Honors, Trump declared that “I’ll be involved” the decision about whether of not to approve the Netflix-WB deal. According to Trump, Sarandos visited the Oval Office last week. During the meeting, the Netflix co-CEO was seeking to reassure the president that his company would not amass anything close to monopoly power — and that other media conglomerates would still be bigger than Netflix together with WB and HBO Max.
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Sarandos is “a fantastic man,” Trump said at the Kennedy Center. “I have a lot of respect for him, but it’s a lot of market share” that Netflix would amass if it owned Warner Bros. and HBO Max. Trump added: “It could be a problem.”
Meanwhile, Trump has been friendly with the Ellisons — “They’re big supporters of mine,” he has boasted — and the president publicly praised David Ellison, saying “he’ll do a great job” as CEO of the merged Skydance Media-Paramount. The Ellisons surely have been bending his ear in trying to persuade him to oppose Netflix’s WB gambit on anticompetitive grounds.
But on Monday morning, Trump lashed out at the Ellisons over this week’s “60 Minutes” segment with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, once an ardent Trump supporter who has earned the president’s displeasure after she criticized his handling of the government shutdown and other issues including the Jeffrey Epstein files.
“Marjorie is not AMERICA FIRST or MAGA, because nobody could have changed her views so fast, and her new views are those of a very dumb person,” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social account. “That was proven last night when washed up, Trump hating, 60 Minutes ‘correspondent,’ Lesley Stahl, who still owes me an apology from when she attacked me on the show (with serious conviction!), that Hunter Biden’s LAPTOP FROM HELL was produced by Russia, not Hunter himself (TOTALLY PROVEN WRONG!), interviewed a very poorly prepared Traitor, who in her confusion made many really stupid statements.”
Trump continued: “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” — and he opined that since the Ellisons bought the company, “60 Minutes has actually gotten WORSE!”
Trump’s opposition to either deal wouldn’t necessarily doom its chances of getting regulatory approval. During Trump’s first term, the Justice Department sued to block AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner on antitrust grounds — a move reportedly motivated by Trump’s hatred of CNN. A federal judge ruled in favor of the companies and in February 2019 the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision.
From Variety US