Paramount Mounts Hostile Takeover of Warner Brothers. Is Trump Even Listening?

Days after the surprise announcement that Netflix had won the Warner Bros. Discovery auction, Paramount is mounting a hostile takeover of the storied media conglomerate. “We believe when they see what is currently in our offer, then that’s what they’ll vote for,” Paramount CEO David Ellison said of shareholders in a CNBC interview Monday. “We’re really here to finish what we started.”

Paramount had been seen as a frontrunner to acquire Warner and its assets, including CNN. But Netflix beat out Ellison on Friday, announcing that it had entered into an agreement to buy WBD for $82.7 billion. Warner CEO David Zaslav said in a statement that the deal between the streamer and the legendary studio—whose name is synonymous with the Old Hollywood system Netflix upended—combined “two of the greatest storytelling companies in the world to bring to even more people the entertainment they love to watch the most.”

“We will ensure people everywhere will continue to enjoy the world’s most resonant stories for generations to come,” Zaslav said at the time.

But the blockbuster deal still needs regulatory approval, and Ellison—whose father, Larry Ellison, is a major backer of President Donald Trump—claims that Paramount Skydance has a smoother path forward. “It could be a problem,” Trump said Sunday of the “big market share” Netflix would hold if the merger went through. (The president nevertheless praised Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, with whom he met in the Oval Office last week before the deal was announced: He has “done one of the greatest jobs in the history of movies and other things,” Trump said.) Sarandos, meanwhile, does. not seem fazed: “We have a deal done, and we are incredibly happy with the deal... We're super confident we're going to get it across,” he reportedly said Monday at a UBS conference. According to CNN’s Brian Stelter, Sarandos also said that he has spoken to Trump several times since the 2024 election, and that Netflix’s interests in this deal are aligned with the president’s: “to create and protect jobs.”

Paramount is going to shareholders with a $30-per-share offer, with backing from Affinity Partners—the private equity firm led by Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law—and from sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi. Paramount executives have also made their case to Trump directly, Semafor reported Monday. Unlike the proposed Netflix merger, the Paramount proposal would include all WBD assets—including CNN, the news outlet Trump has raged at for years.

Still, it remains to be seen if Paramount’s approach will pay off. A source complained to Semafor that Paramount is “leaning into all the stereotypes” of the Trump administration’s corruption, which is leaving a bad taste in the mouths of some Washington officials. And as Ellison made his big move Monday, Trump was busy lashing out at Paramount over Lesley Stahl’s Sunday night 60 Minutes interview with Marjorie Taylor Greene, a onetime MAGA star who has recently fallen out of the president’s favor and announced she will resign from Congress in the new year. “My real problem with the show…wasn’t the low IQ traitor, it was that the new ownership of 60 Minutes, Paramount, would allow a show like this to air,” Trump posted in a long, wild rant on social media. “THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP.”