On Dec. 7, while fielding questions at the Kennedy Center Honors, President Donald Trump voiced skepticism about Netflix’s announced $83 billion acquisition of parts of Warner Bros. Discovery, explaining it “could be a problem” due to the resulting overall market share. He added, “I’ll be involved in that decision.”
Paramount owner David Ellison, who’s also pursuing WBD, sat that night in the Kennedy Center’s presidential box. The next morning his company announced a hostile bid at more than $108 billion, arguing against a Netflix tie-up in part on antitrust grounds.
Ellison and his father Larry, the second richest person in the world, have been currying favor with Trump since his return to office as they seek to assemble a media behemoth, including possible control over the U.S. spin-off of TikTok. CBS News is being scrubbed of perceived liberal bias under newly hired editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, a bete noir of progressives; the long-dead Rush Hour 4 was greenlit at Paramount as the urging of the president, whose wife is in business with its director Brett Ratner; and Ellison has reportedly made it clear to the White House that if he’s successful in his pursuit of WBD he’d make what have been described as large-scale changes at CNN, a network which Trump loathes.
The elder Ellison was an early and significant financial supporter of the president. Likewise avowedly Team Trump is Safra Catz, who joined the Paramount board after the Skydance Media merger completed in August. The former CEO of Ellison’s Oracle Corporation, she was a member of the 2016 Trump transition team and was considered for several high-level appointments, including Director of National Intelligence and United States Trade Representative.
In October, Paramount hired Makan Delrahim as its chief legal officer. He ran the Department of Justice’s antitrust division during the first Trump term. The company has also brought on the lobbying firm he worked for during the Biden interval: Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, an influence-peddling shop known in Washington, D.C., as a revolving door for Trumpworld figures.
“We have a good relationship with the administration,” Ellison explained on stage at a Bloomberg event in October. But it could always be sweetened. Among the newly announced partners in Paramount’s bid: the investment firm launched by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and unofficial global envoy.
Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, a prominent Democrat who campaigned for Kamala Harris, sought out Trump for a Mar-a-Lago dinner after the election. It’s unknown whether the president spoke to him about Netflix’s deal with Barack and Michelle Obama for their Higher Ground Productions. (Sarandos’ wife Nicole Avant was a prominent Obama fundraiser and later served as his ambassador to the Bahamas.) But when Sarandos recently returned to the White House he did so with Clete Willems, who the streaming giant hired as its head of global affairs in April. Willems was deputy assistant to the president for international economics and deputy director of the National Economic Council during the first Trump administration.
On the Kennedy Center’s red carpet, Trump said of Netflix that it’s a “great company” that’s “done a phenomenal job,” specifically calling out Sarandos as “fantastic.” He added, “we’ll see what happens.” The next morning, as the Ellisons’ hostile bid made headlines, and the president took to social media to rail against Paramount leadership over a 60 Minutes segment, Netflix announced that Virginia Boney Moore was its new director of federal affairs. She’d previously worked as a special assistant to Trump in his first term’s Office of Legislative Affairs.
There’s already been bipartisan agita over both parties’ pursuit of WBD. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), chair of the Judiciary’s antitrust subcommittee, wrote in response to the Netflix announcement that there were “a lot of antitrust red flags here.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), known for leveraging her own position on the Judiciary against what she views as anticompetitive mergers, in turn called Paramount’s hostile bid “a five-alarm antitrust fire and exactly what our anti-monopoly laws are written to prevent.”
Yet the business players involved in this saga presume that the regulatory state is likely a sideshow. In this era, the true power — and final verdict — flows through a monarchical presidency. Trump himself likes to keep everyone guessing, even amid the obvious kowtowing. “None of them are particularly great friends of mine,” he said on Dec. 8.
Which is why the real question is what crony-capitalist jockeying and capitulating might yet surface in exchange for Trump’s greenlight. Perhaps an output deal for Muse, Melania Trump’s recently announced production company. Or maybe an overbid for the media rights to the Kennedy Center Honors. Or certain hirings and firings and deals for CNN. “I don’t think the people that are running [WBD] right now and running CNN, which is a very dishonest group of people,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday. “I don’t think that should be allowed to continue.”
He added, “I think it’s imperative that CNN be sold.”
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