Jason Hall

But they've been incredibly disciplined operators.

and they use a playbook around discipline and making the right moves and staying within what you're good at doing, I think they're going to do the same thing here.

The stakes are certainly higher than in the past because of the size of this transaction.

Now, the question, of course, are Warner Brothers Discovery shareholders going to let Netflix follow through and actually close the deal that the two management teams agreed to do?

We didn't really hit on something important about that AT&T deal for Time Warner in 2018.

It paid $85 billion.

The quarter before WBD was spun out as a standalone company, AT&T took a $25 billion goodwill impairment.

It definitely feels like a cursed asset.

But I think the difference, really, is that both of those two prior deals we talked about, these were disparate businesses and assets.

that were really just empire building.

These weren't integrating things that worked well together, like we're talking about with Netflix, where this is obviously part of their core business, and it's additive to that, instead of empire building.

Let's be honest, empire building, royalty are the only ones that enjoy the riches.

In businesses, that's the executives and the grand viziers, which are the M&A bankers.

I also want to push back just a little bit on the Disney-Fox situation.

Frankly, I don't think that's gone great.

There's definitely been benefits getting the 21st Century Fox.

There's value there.

Hulu, that's been probably the greatest value there.

But the Fox side of that business, they're making about half as many movies as they were since before the acquisition.

Then think about the linear TV challenges, they've eroded a lot of that value.