Ellison's Paramount makes $108B cash offer for Warner Bros. Discovery, escalating buyout fight with Netflix

Paramount Skydance (PSKY) announced connected Monday a bid to get Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) successful an all-cash woody worthy $30 per share, oregon astir $108.4 billion, arsenic the institution moves to apical Netflix's (NFLX) woody struck past week to get the storied studio.

Paramount banal roseate much than 6% aft the announcement, portion Warner Bros. banal roseate arsenic overmuch arsenic 7%.

Paramount's bid connected Monday would spot the institution get each of Warner Bros.' assets. On Friday, Netflix agreed to get Warner Bros.' TV, film, studios, and streaming part for $72 cardinal — astir $27.75 per stock — successful a cash-and-stock woody that would spot Warner Bros. shareholders person $23.35 per share, on with $4.50 successful Netflix communal stock.

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The tentative woody betwixt Warner Bros. Discovery and Netflix, agreed to by the boards of some companies, has yet to person support nether the national government's antitrust reappraisal process, wherever occurrence is acold from guaranteed.

A combined Netflix–WBD would power astir a 3rd of US streaming activity, according to information from JustWatch, a level that measures streaming engagement crossed US services, mounting up ripe conditions for a drawn-out and fiercely captious woody reappraisal from the Justice Department. President Trump has already flagged imaginable antitrust questions astir the deal, adding substance to concerns astir regulatory opposition.

“Well, that’s got to spell done a process, and we’ll spot what happens,” Trump said astatine an lawsuit connected Sunday. “But it is simply a large marketplace share. It could beryllium a problem.”

Taking vantage of what it sees arsenic a still-open model of opportunity, Paramount's Monday greeting bid is the latest successful a enactment of attempts by David Ellison's institution to get the storied Hollywood entity. By mid-October 2025, Paramount had made 3 unsuccessful and unsolicited proposals for Warner Bros., culminating successful a $58 cardinal connection astatine $20 per share.

All 3 entrées were rejected by Warner Bros., helmed by Hollywood mogul David Zaslav. The institution saw the offers arsenic excessively debased and doubted that Ellison could really rise the superior needed to get a woody implicit the decorativeness line, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Ellison's statement this clip is, essentially, simplicity.

In raising commitments for its caller offer, astatine astir treble the worth of its archetypal play, Paramount sought to soothe Netflix's directors and shareholders by proposing a "radical simplification" of its financing.

Earlier plans to rise the indispensable superior for the archetypal offers had relied connected a web of investments and commitments. Some of the equity would beryllium funded by Ellison and his father, Larry, the laminitis and enforcement president of Oracle (ORCL); immoderate by RedBird Capital, which provided overmuch of the financing for David Ellison's acquisition of Paramount from Shari Redstone; immoderate by Middle Eastern sovereign wealthiness funds; and immoderate by Jared Kushner's backstage equity firm.