One of the world’s richest men, and his son, wanted to buy one of the most prestigious assets in the media world.
Now they have gotten their wish.
That’s the important part about Monday’s news: Larry and David Ellion’s Paramount has settled a lawsuit brought by California and several other states, which sought to hold up Paramount’s planned acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. With that out of the way, there are no longer any serious regulatory challenges to the deal. So the Ellisons can start finalizing their $111 billion acquisition in the very near future.
That means the Ellisons will have combined control of major media assets, including two movie studios, HBO, and TV networks, including CBS, CNN, and dozens more.
If you want to, you can dig into the details of the settlement to see what the Ellisons gave up to make this go away. The TLDR: Not much.
A little longer: Rob Bonta, the California attorney general who led the antitrust case, repeatedly said he wanted “structural” changes to clear a Paramount/WBD deal — something that would have required the Ellisons to jettison some part of their combined businesses. He didn’t get any of that.
Instead, Bonta’s main selling point is that he now has an “enforceable commitment” that the Ellisons’ studios will make at least 30 movies a year — which is a pledge Ellison has been making publicly since April.
Perhaps that’s why Bonta spent much of his press conference explaining why he was working hard on other antitrust suits, while conceding that he didn’t get the outcome he wanted here.
“I didn’t believe these two companies should merge,” he said Monday. “I still don’t.”
It’s happening anyway. And it reinforces why many observers thought a year ago that Larry and David Ellison would end up owning Warner Bros. Discovery before they’d even formally announced their plan to buy WBD.
The logic was:
- Larry Ellison was one of the richest men in the world (he’s currently worth an estimated $200 billion — down considerably from $400 billion last fall, when his Oracle stock was flying on an AI-fueled spree, but still enough to be ranked No. 7 on Bloomberg’s list of the world’s billionaires).
- Larry Ellison is close to Donald Trump: “We have a good relationship with the administration,” his son David acknowledged a year ago — and Donald Trump treats federal agencies like the Department of Justice as an extension of himself. So if Donald Trump wanted regulators to sign off on a Paramount-WBD deal, they would.
We saw both of those dynamics play out over the course of the last year. Last December, for instance, Netflix convinced WBD to sell some of itself to the streaming giant, instead of Paramount’s buy-the-whole-thing deal. But a few months later, Netflix walked away from the deal —possibly because it saw regulatory issues in its path, but at least as likely because Paramount had signaled that money really wasn’t an object, and that it was willing to keep raising its price to get the deal done.
Netflix shareholders definitely didn’t want the company in a bidding war. The Ellison family doesn’t have to answer to anyone but Larry Ellison, who is personally guaranteeing financing for the purchase.
And not surprisingly, Trump’s DOJ signed off on the Ellisons’ deal, in June, reportedly before staff attorneys skeptical of the deal were allowed to weigh in. This month, the DOJ went further to signal its support of Paramount via a filing in the states’ suit.
The one advantage Bonta seemed to have was time: The longer the deal took to get done, the more pressure the Ellisons would be under, for various reasons. But David Ellison countered with tactics that put Bonta and his state under pressure: chiefly, a series of news stories asserting that Ellison was just about to move at least part of Paramount outside California.
Whether Ellison was ever truly serious about that — or how he’d square his professed love of Hollywood with plans to leave Hollywood, which might make it much harder for him to make deals with Hollywood talent — remains unclear. Bonta says would-be-moving plans didn’t impact his decision to settle — but he also said his settlement with the Ellisons doesn’t include a promise to stay in California. So maybe we get a repeat performance someday.
Could Bonta have played his cards better and gotten something truly meaningful out of Paramount in exchange? Maybe. But just because Bonta was able to slow the deal down for a few months doesn’t mean he was ever likely to derail it completely — something he says he would like to do in an ideal world.
But regulators and politicians around the world — not just ones close to Donald Trump — approved the deal. The Ellisons have nearly all the money in the world. Rob Bonta and some other states’ attorneys weren’t going to get it stopped, either.
