Neal Freiman

bought Paramount last year, and now Paramount is buying Warner Brothers Discovery.

It's just getting bigger.

And then meanwhile, his father, Larry Ellison, of Oracle fame, now owns a piece of U.S.

TikTok.

So the Ellisons are the new media titans in the room.

There are questions remaining about the regulatory process ahead.

California's attorney general came out last night and said, this deal is not over.

Both of these companies are in my jurisdiction, and we're going to give it a long, hard look.

Well, I think they might be concerned about the concentration of the Ellison family, who is very close to President Trump.

And David Ellison has made a lot of big changes at CBS by bringing in Barry Weiss there.

And now if CBS is sister companies with CNN, I just think there's a lot of sort of concern or a lot of uncertainty about what might happen to these big news organizations, especially with one billionaire family controlling a lot of the pie.

Well, I said there were two business news haymakers.

The other one was a move that is creating shockwaves around Silicon Valley and the wider labor market.

Block, the fintech company run by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, said it was going to reduce its workforce by nearly half because of AI cutting about 4,000 people.

In a long post on X, Dorsey explained his rationale.

We're already seeing the intelligence tools we're creating and using paired with smaller and flatter teams are enabling a new way of working, which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company.

And that's accelerating rapidly.

I had two options cut gradually over months or years as the shift plays out or be honest about where we are and act on it now.

I chose the latter.

What's perhaps even more surprising and ominous than the layoffs was the market reaction.