Chapter 1: What is the Hollywood drama surrounding Warner Bros. Discovery?
Netflix versus Paramount to grab Warner Brothers. Is it news that Hollywood likes drama? I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. Let us update the competition for the Hollywood studio Warner Brothers Discovery. Now, Paramount is launching a bid, a hostile one, because Warner Brothers board already approved a deal with Netflix. Marketplace's Nancy Marshall-Genzer joins us now.
Hostile versus friendly. How's this work? Well, this type of transaction is not always welcomed by the target company's board of directors. That is certainly the case here, since the Warner Brothers board has sided with Netflix. But Paramount is appealing to Warner Brothers shareholders. It says it's offering them a better deal, even if it's a hostile one.
And there's a crucial role for Warner Brothers shareholders here, which could help Paramount prevail. Well, they still have to approve the Netflix deal.
Chapter 2: How does Paramount's hostile takeover bid affect Warner Bros.?
It's not at all final. If enough Warner Brothers investors sell their shares to Paramount, it could get a majority stake. Then it could install board members who would approve its hostile bid. A hostile bidder can also ask shareholders to replace board members with people who support the hostile acquisition. Right.
But even with shareholder and board approval, any deal has to be approved by federal regulators and they could be worried about creating a monopoly here. Right. Especially since Paramount wants to buy all of Warner Brothers, including its cable channels. Netflix just wants Warner Brothers film and TV studios plus HBO.
Paramount CEO David Ellison says Netflix's deal would combine the biggest and third biggest streamers in the country. He says that raises antitrust concerns. But Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos says the Warner Brothers transaction gets it into businesses it's basically not in right now. President Trump has weighed in here.
He says he will be involved in the approval process for any deal, which is unusual for a president. Nancy, thank you. The Trump administration is clearing the way for NVIDIA to begin selling one of its most advanced microchips to China, a significant easing of U.S. export controls targeting Chinese tech. But the deal means the U.S.
government could pocket 25 percent of the proceeds up from a 15 percent tax worked out late this summer. Lily Jamali is tech correspondent for the BBC.
It's a complicated political situation because even though there are certainly Democrats in Congress and even some Republicans who have a lot of national security concerns about the sale of these kinds of chips, it's not clear if they are going to be able to leverage whatever power they have left to change anything. Donald Trump is moving forward with this basically unilaterally.
I think a lot of this really depends on what Beijing does. Does Beijing actually allow Chinese companies to purchase these chips?
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Chapter 3: What role do shareholders play in the acquisition process?
Donald Trump has said that she responded positively, but we're not sure if that's actually where China stands right now. It's been six years since our China correspondent was filing on a mysterious coronavirus causing lockdowns in Wuhan, China. None of us fully appreciated what was to come. Now, all these years later, U.S. office buildings are still not running at pre-pandemic capacity.
And New York is among the places now leading the way to make it easier to turn office space into living space, Marketplace's Samantha Fields reports. In New York City, more than 12,000 apartments are currently in the works in buildings that used to be offices. About 3,000 of those will be designated as affordable.
New York took big steps to make it a lot easier for office-to-residential conversions over the last 18 months. Dan Grodnick directs the city's planning department and chairs its planning commission. He says officials spent about a year studying what was making it hard for developers to do office-to-housing conversions.
And what we came up with was the regulatory limitations, that's the zoning rules, and the financial limitations, and that's where the tax incentive came to be. The city changed zoning laws to make it easier for more office buildings to be converted, and the state approved those tax breaks to make the math work for developers and require them to build at least some affordable units.
And we are already seeing the results. New York is leading the way when it comes to turning old, vacant office buildings into apartments, says Tracy Haddon Lowe at the Brookings Institution.
I think that speaks to the fact that New York is a really unique market in the sense that there's a huge concentration of an enormous amount of office inventory in this extremely central, very desirable location where there is also very, very strong demand for housing. But there are initiatives to encourage more of these projects in other cities, too. Chicago has one. Boston has one. L.A.
has one. Vincent Reyna at the University of Pennsylvania says cities that want more office space turned into housing need to be proactive about making policy changes like New York has been. We need zoning that allows it to happen. We often need financing tools that allows it to happen and often political will for these things to kind of move forward.
And he says he is seeing more of that around the country. Just the other week, the city of Philadelphia announced that they received approval from the state to try to create a tax abatement program for these kinds of conversions. In New York, Dan Grodnick with the Planning Commission says office-to-housing conversions can help solve several problems.
They create an opportunity for us to give life to a struggling office building, create some housing in the process, and also create vibrant neighborhoods where in some cases they are getting less vibrant as a result of vacancies.
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