With Netflix Retreat, Trump Ally Larry Ellison Will Soon Own Warner Brothers, HBO, CNN, CBS, Paramount, Discovery, And Part Of TikTok

Netflix has retreated from its protracted bidding war with Larry Ellison for control of Warner Brothers, giving the Trump ally likely control of Warner, CNN, and HBO. In a statement, Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters said that Paramount’s latest offer made the acquisition financially irresponsible:

“The transaction we negotiated would have created shareholder value with a clear path to regulatory approval. However, we’ve always been disciplined, and at the price required to match Paramount Skydance’s latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive, so we are declining to match the Paramount Skydance bid.”

As we’ve repeatedly noted, Ellison is clearly attempting to to buy his way to a total domination of U.S. media (with the help of Saudi cash). The acquisition of Warner Brothers and its assets come after Ellison gained control of CBS and a significant portion of TikTok thanks to some help from Trump and bumbling Democrats.

As we’ve seen with the Ellison family mismanagement of CBS, a big part of the acquisition involves converting acquired assets into Trump-friendly agitprop. It’s the exact trajectory we’ve seen play out in autocratic countries like Hungary, where authoritarian-allied oligarchs buy up media outlets and pummel the public with propaganda while the government strangles publicly owned and independent journalism just out of frame.

The merger was made possible, in part, by the Trump administration’s efforts to help Ellison and Paramount elbow out Netflix. That included a disinformation campaign across right wing media falsely portraying Netflix as a “woke” leftist company, as well as a fake DOJ antitrust investigation into Netflix (that will now mysteriously disappear now that Larry Ellison has likely gotten his prize).

This trajectory was always very clear; recall that Trump and Ellison met last year to discuss which CNN reporters Ellison would fire to please Trump. The history of authoritarian movements suggests that not too long after this deal is finalized you can expect a significant ramping up of hostilities against independent journalism that speaks truth to power (whatever’s left of it in the U.S.).

I’d like you to take a peek at the news coverage of this whole mess and notice how few outlets even acknowledge that Trump administration corruption played a role, much less acknowledge that the goal here is autocratic-friendly propaganda.

If there’s a potential positive here, it’s that nobody at Ellisons’ companies appear particularly competent. Bari Weiss was hired to convert CBS into a ratings-friendly, autocrat coddling trolling and propaganda farm, and the result as been broadly disastrous.

The massive debt load from massively overpaying for Warner Brothers is also likely to cause major operational headaches that could result in this being a short-lived adventure much like the several-decades worth of pointless Warner media mergers (including AT&T) that preceded it.

In addition to promising a whopping $111 billion (or $31 per share), Paramount promised a ticking fee payable to shareholders equal to $0.25 per quarter beginning after Sept. 30, 2026, a $7 billion regulatory termination fee if the deal doesn’t cross the finish line, and $2.8 billion to cover Netflix’s proposed payout to Warner Bros for their own deal failing to materialize.

That’s a lot of money for the Ellisons (and the Saudis) to dump into a company that has, again, seen nothing but a two-decade history of disastrous overvalued mergers resulting in a progressively shittier and less creative company, broadly despised by creatives after a parade of brutal layoffs (much more of which are certainly coming to pay off debt).

Things could could be further complicated by a sudden subscriber exodus across the brands, or the Ellisons’ fortunes being further strained by a potential AI hype bubble collapse. All the lazy AI-generated Batman IP slop in the world will be able to save this mess if the winds don’t blow favorably in the Ellisons’ direction over the next two years.

Still, an overt authoritarian oligarch is now very close to controlling an unprecedented segment of U.S. traditional and new media. If it follows the established autocratic playbook, this push will continue until it runs into something other than pudding-soft public, political, and policy opposition. There’s a window here for policymakers and consumers to ensure the gambit fails, but the hour is getting late.