Lauren Hirsch

Hello.

Before Paramount Skydance, as it's now known, there was Skydance, which was run by David Ellison, the son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison.

Really rich family, which is important to this story.

Larry helped finance David's acquisition of Paramount, which just closed a couple months ago.

Very huge brand.

It has CBS.

It has the studio behind The Godfather, Mission Impossible.

It's a huge company.

And all of a sudden, David Ellison comes on the scene as a media mogul.

But what also becomes very evident is he is a small media mogul.

In comparison to David Zasloff over at WBD, Ted Sarandos at Netflix, what's really important right now in media is streaming.

And Paramount Plus, Paramount's streaming business, is a drop in the bucket when compared to those.

Right.

And so key to Ellison's strategy, frankly, even before they closed his purchase of Paramount, was buying Warner Bros.

Discovery.

So once Warner Bros.

Discovery made clear that it might be considering some kind of option, like splitting its business in half, David Ellison pounced, and he has made a number of bids trying to buy Warner Bros.,

So Warner Brothers board ran a process and they spoke to bidders.

They asked Paramount.

They asked Netflix to tell them what they were willing to put up, how they were hoping to finance it.