Larry and David Ellison are getting another shot to buy Warner Bros. Discovery.
The media conglomerate announced Tuesday that it will let the Ellisons make another bid for the company over the next week, with two key stipulations: Their offer has to be more than $31 for each share of WBD, and it will be the last time the Ellisons get to make a formal pitch to the WBD board.
WBD’s announcement reopens a deal that was theoretically closed last December, when it agreed to sell most of itself to Netflix in an $83 billion transaction.
Since then, the Ellisons, who bought Paramount last year and want to merge it with WBD, have argued that their offer of $30 per share — for the entire company — was better than Netflix’s offer.
They have repeatedly told WBD and its investors that they should get another shot at making their case. Their most recent pitch came a week ago, when they offered to pay billions more in fees — including a $2.8 billion penalty WBD would owe Netflix if it walks away from its existing deal — and dangled the prospect of raising the per-share price they’d pay if the deal didn’t close by the end of 2026.
Now, WBD says, they have one more opportunity to bid. WBD says they expect the Ellisons to increase their offer to more than $31 a share. The company is trading around $28 a share, up 170% in the last year.
In a press release, WBD officials say that last week, a “senior representative” for Paramount told them that if they had the chance to bid, they would offer $31 per share, but could go above that.
None of this means the existing deal Netflix has with WBD goes away. For starters, WBD continues to formally endorse its Netflix deal. More important: If Paramount does increase its bid, Netflix will have the ability to raise its offer, too.
And no matter what bid WBD eventually agrees to, the deal will still need regulatory approval in the US and overseas. Netflix got a preview of some of the issues regulators might bring up earlier this month during a congressional hearing, when Republicans argued that the company is too woke, and Democrats worried that a combined Netflix/WBD could doom the movie industry.
A Paramount/WBD combination would also get regulatory scrutiny, though the Ellisons are counting on their ties to the Trump White House to give them a leg up.