Money wins again, as Netflix drops its Warner Bros. acquisition dreams

Writing that “this transaction was always a ‘nice to have at the right price,’ not a ‘must have at any price'” arrangement, Netflix CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters released a statement today announcing that they were throwing in the towel, declining to try to match David Ellison’s currently offered price of $31 per share for WBD. (Comparing the two bids is tricky, because Paramount has been trying to buy all of Warner Bros. Discovery, while Netflix only wanted part of it, but the Paramount deal is being valued somewhere in the neighborhood of $77 billion, while analysts were attaching a $72 billion price tag to Netflix’s bid.) Tossing in a lot of the usual blustery boilerplate about how Netflix is doing fine, actually, and will now take this little breakup as an opportunity to invest in itself, the letter nevertheless made it clear: Too rich for our blood, so eat up, Ellisons.

The streamer backing out—including collecting a $2.8 billion breakup fee for the existing deal that Paramount also agreed to pay as part of the terms of its latest offer—leaves Paramount as the last hog at the trough. The company (whose “sucking up to the White House” muscles have already been well honed through its own acquisition by Ellison’s Skydance last year) seems pretty confident it’ll be able to get regulatory approval for the purchase, having already greased the wheels of antitrust regulation, and offered Warner Bros.’ board a “tick fee” that will increase the sale price if the sale gets held up past September of 2026.

And, look: It’s not like we were excited for Netflix, a company that has its fair share of very regular, very public fuck-ups, to suddenly be able to make its own terrible Space Jam sequels. But it would have at least been interesting, and messy, to see how those two organization’s corporate goals would have clashed with each other, with the possibility of something potentially worthwhile resulting from the fallout. There’s nothing so chaotic or invigorating about Paramount swallowing up a rival, though: Just “Money wins again,” i.e., the oldest story in the world—with the added, highly tumorous wrinkle that the Ellison family has not been shy about throwing their weight around, politically, after buying CBS and Paramount, a treatment now hypothetically in the offing for folks at CNN, HBO, and elsewhere in the Warner Bros. media empire.