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The president isn’t picking sides in the battle to own Warner Bros. Discovery—at least not yet. On Friday, the company announced that Netflix would acquire it for $83 billion. A day later, Paramount Skydance launched a roughly $108 billion hostile-takeover bid, backed in part by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. But when Trump was asked on Monday for his take on the media showdown, he was noncommittal: “None of them are particularly great friends of mine.”
It’s not for lack of trying. Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos made a play for the president’s favor last month, visiting the White House to discuss Warner Bros.’ prospects. Before then, the leading candidate to purchase the media giant was Paramount Skydance. Its CEO, David Ellison, is the son of the software centibillionaire Larry Ellison—a key Trump ally—and has teased sweeping changes to CNN (owned by Warner Bros.) if his company succeeds in its takeover. Paramount Skydance’s chief legal officer, Makan Delrahim, handled antitrust law for the Justice Department during Trump’s first term. The Ellisons’ relationship with the president is close enough that when Trump reportedly asked Larry to green-light Rush Hour 4—almost 20 years after Rush Hour 3 came out—Paramount Skydance made it happen.
The Netflix-Warner Bros. deal will likely spend more than a year in regulatory review. Presidents can’t unilaterally decide who buys or sells a company, but that reality has so far been less important than the perception that Trump might be able to sway the outcome. Asked on Sunday whether the mammoth transaction would meet the bar for regulatory approval, Trump said, “I’ll be involved in that decision.” Craig Aaron, the president of the media watchdog Free Press, told me that when it comes to corporate mergers, he’s never before seen “personality-based wooing” of any president on this scale: “He’s saying, Impress me—nobody’s my friend yet, but they could be.” Much of the analysis from Wall Street, Aaron said, comes down to “Who does Trump like best? It’s an almost unfathomable way of doing business.”
Mega-businesses structure their mega-deals in a way that’s consistent with existing regulations rather than with a president’s particular whims. The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission vet most telecommunications deals independently of the president—but their influence has limits. Trump learned that lesson during his first term, when his Justice Department sought to stop AT&T and DirecTV’s 2017 purchase of Time Warner. On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump had gone on record opposing the deal, claiming that it consolidated too much power in too few hands (his feud with CNN, then owned by Time Warner, may have had something to do with it too). But even with Trump’s explicit backing, the Justice Department couldn’t stop the merger; in 2019, a federal appeals judge ruled that the deal could stand.
Things are different this time around. Paramount and Skydance completed their merger in August under the watchful eyes of Trump-appointed regulators. As part of an effort to get the deal over the line, the companies agreed to certain mandates set by the Federal Communications Commission: dismantle DEI programs and install an ombudsman to oversee the ideological bias of the company’s content. Because Netflix isn’t looking to buy any of the Warner Bros. cable networks, the FCC won’t be involved in the approval process—but the Justice Department and the FTC could still attach all sorts of strings to the deal. The traditional regulatory split, wherein the regulators, not the president, review the deal, remains intact. But the ongoing hollowing out of the Justice Department may end up supercharging Trump’s influence: Many of the “normative restrictions around the president using the department as a weapon” have been eroded during Trump’s second term, according to my colleague Quinta Jurecic.
There’s also the question of Trump’s broader interest in antitrust enforcement. During the Biden administration, the DOJ and the FTC instituted new Merger Guidelines that increased federal scrutiny of major deals; for now, those rules remain in place. Trump has fretted in the past about consolidation, but the broad MAGA coalition includes both populist trustbusters and unabashedly pro-corporate figures. His promise to “be involved” with the deal’s approval process could cut both ways.
As of now, no company has fully earned Trump’s loyalty. At the Kennedy Center Honors on Sunday, David Ellison sat with him in the presidential box. The following morning, Trump castigated Paramount Skydance for allowing an interview with Marjorie Taylor Greene to air on 60 Minutes. By making a show of his indecision, the president is inviting a battle for his affections—but staying friends with Trump can be its own challenge.
Related:
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Today’s News
- The U.S. military seized a large oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast, President Donald Trump said, following an interview released yesterday in which he said that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s “days are numbered.”
- A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from deploying the California National Guard in Los Angeles.
- A federal judge ordered the unsealing of grand-jury records from Jeffrey Epstein’s 2019 sex-trafficking case, citing a new law requiring the release of Epstein-related documents while protecting victims’ privacy.
Evening Read
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Michael Paulsen / Houston Chronicle / Getty.
The Most Impractical Tool in My Kitchen
By Tyler Austin Harper
My relationship with carbon-steel knives began with a lie. When I was in graduate school a few years ago, I walked into a schmancy New York City knife shop, determined to buy a lithe 210-millimeter Suisin Gyuto. But the clerk didn’t want to sell it to me. The poor man had quite evidently been traumatized by prior customers who had bought (and presumably returned) high-maintenance knives that they were not prepared to take care of. He seemed desperate to get me to buy a stainless-steel one instead.
But no, I wanted that knife. I had landed on it after countless hours poring over Reddit threads when I should have been writing my master’s thesis. “It will be a lot of work!” the salesman said. Then: “It will rust!” And: “It must be hand washed!” And: “Can I show you these knives over here?” His pleas became more and more plaintive until, eager to end both of our miseries, I exclaimed: “It’s a Christmas gift for a friend! He has other carbon-steel knives already!” The lie, at last, appeased him. Minutes later I was out in the cold, clutching my shopping bag, inside it my tall, thin “gift” wrapped in gold paper.
The salesman was, of course, right.
Read the full article.
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Illustration by Anna Ruch / The Atlantic. Sources: ATR / Historic Collection / Alamy
Read. Googoosh’s love songs are both banned and beloved in her homeland, Arash Azizi writes. Her new memoir reveals a life as rich and painful as Iran’s history.
Watch. Mad Men’s messy HBO Max debut reveals the quirks of ushering old shows into a new era, David Sims writes.
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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