David Folkenflik
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Netflix struck a deal to buy Warner's Hollywood Studios, its back catalog and intellectual property, as well as HBO Max.
Paramount's David Ellison, backed by his father, the co-founder of Oracle and one of the wealthiest people on Earth, has offered more.
He also wants cable channels like CNN and TNT and Discovery.
But Ellison says the cable channels have zero equity value.
That's nada, nothing, bupkis.
Paramount has filed suit in a Delaware court to try to force Warner to disclose more detail about that Netflix deal.
And Ellison is appealing directly to Warner shareholders, saying he's going to nominate his own slate of directors for Warner to try to pull off a Hollywood mega merger.
Larry Ellison is the co-founder of Oracle and one of the world's richest people.
He agreed to personally guarantee $40 billion of his offer, valued at more than $100 billion.
With his son, David Ellison now has a controlling stake in Paramount, which owns CBS and Paramount Plus Streaming.
They want to combine it with Warner to take on Netflix, Amazon, Apple, and a bulked-up Disney.
Warner Brothers Discovery chairman Sam DiPiazza told CNBC, no dice, though Netflix doesn't want its cable channels.
DiPiazza argues that antitrust regulators in the U.S.
and abroad would be more likely to knock down a takeover by Paramount.
She argued that CBS News, and particularly 60 Minutes, kind of more storied television news magazine of all time, needed to advance the ball beyond what had been reported in The New York Times and elsewhere earlier this fall, and that they needed to be having senior administration officials on the record, on camera, in order to do that, to make it a story worthy of broadcast.
She said, you know, if the story's not ripe, I'm not going to put it on the air, even if it's already been promoted.
Carr pressured the Walt Disney Company to take action against Jimmy Kimmel's ABC show, famously saying, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.
Minnesota Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar asked him about that.