from the building-state-television dept
We’ve noted how right wing billionaire Larry Ellison, as part of his attempt to control the entirety of media, had launched a $108 billion hostile takeover bid for Warner Brothers backed by Saudi cash.
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 (as we just saw CBS and Bari Weiss demonstrate in vivid detail).
In Larry’s way on the road to dominating media sits Netflix, which had already struck its own $82.7 billion deal with Warner Bros. The Warner board has consistently supported the Netflix deal as the safer option, and last week rejected the CBS/Paramount/Ellison family hostile takeover bid.
The Warner board generally had two major concerns: they were worried that this weird assortment of Saudi money wasn’t fully backed by Larry, and therefore wasn’t particularly reliable. And they were generally worried that the inclusions of the Saudis would trigger complicated national security regulatory review, slowing down the approval process.
Larry, for his part, this week tried to ease Warner board concerns by stating he would personally guarantee $40 billion of his own cash as a backstop to the deal:
“The guarantee, disclosed in a filing on Monday, seeks to allay the Warner Bros board’s doubts about Paramount’s financing and the lack of full Ellison family backing, which had pushed it toward the competing cash-and-stock offer from Netflix.”
Warner has given every indication they’re more comfortable with Netflix, and I suspect won’t be willing to soften their stance. If Warner refuses, it’s almost certain that Ellison will have Trump’s DOJ threaten fake-populist, phony antitrust action in the new year, featuring lots and lots of propaganda about how Netflix is a dire antitrust concern, but Larry Ellison’s ownership would be a gift from the heavens.
Arguably, a country with functional regulators (which we aren’t) would block all media consolidation, since these deals inevitably result in mass layoffs, higher consumer prices, less competition, and shittier overall product (example A: the last two Time Warner mergers with AT&T and Discovery).
But only one of these two options leads to the potential for Trump-allied authoritarian state television owned by a technofascist billionaire (see: Hungary), making it the bigger threat to folks who like things like Democracy. That’s not to soft sell the harms Netflix could cause, which will be ample (especially as they debase themselves to gain approval), but one path is clearly worse.
So in the absence of blocking all media consolidation (which, again, won’t happen because the U.S. is too corrupt to function), Democrats are most likely better served by finding ways to back Netflix’s play for Warner Brothers assets. I’m not sure they’re going to be strategically bright enough to realize that.
It’s worth noting that Netflix doesn’t want CNN and its sorry-ass ratings, and that CNN and Warner’s other cable channels are likely to be spun off and sold anyway, giving Larry Ellison yet another chance to acquire CNN, and like CBS, turn it into a right wing propaganda mill whose primary function will be to kiss the ass of increasingly unpopular autocrats.
Filed Under: consolidation, larry ellison
Companies: cnn, netflix, paramount, warner bros. discovery
