Larry Ellison is very excited to destroy what’s left of CNN, which sweetens the pot for a hostile takeover by Warner

of the building-state television dept

We saw how right-wing billionaire Larry Ellison, as part of his attempt to control the entire media, launched a $108 billion hostile takeover bid for Warner Brothers, backed by Saudi money.

Larry, as we’ve seen with CBS and its interest in TikTok, is trying to turn what’s left of the American media into a giant safe space for wealthy right-wing autocrats and the right-wing culture war grievance and infotainment complex (as we’ve just seen CBS and Bari Weiss demonstrate in vivid detail).

In Larry’s path to media domination is Netflix, which had already struck its own $82.7 billion deal with Warner Bros. Warner’s board has consistently backed the Netflix deal as the safer option, and last week rejected the hostile takeover bid from the CBS/Paramount/Ellison family.

The Warner board generally had two major concerns: They were concerned that this strange assortment of Saudi money was not fully backed by Larry and therefore not particularly reliable. And they were generally concerned that including the Saudis would lead to complicated revisions to national security regulations, slowing the approval process.

Larry, for his part, tried to assuage the Warner board’s concerns this week by declaring that he would personally act as guarantor $40 billion of his own money as a backstop for the deal:

“The guarantee, disclosed in a filing Monday, is intended to address Warner Bros. board concerns about Paramount’s financing and the lack of full support from the Ellison family, which had pushed the company toward Netflix’s competitive cash-and-stock offering.”

Warner has given every indication that they are becoming more comfortable with Netflix, and I suspect they won’t be willing to soften their stance. If Warner refuses, it’s almost certain that Ellison will have Trump’s DOJ threatened in the new year with bogus populist, bogus antitrust actions, with lots of propaganda about how Netflix is ​​a dire antitrust problem, but is owned by Larry Ellison would be a gift from heaven.

A country with functional regulators (which we are not) would undoubtedly block this all media consolidation, as these deals inevitably result in massive layoffs, higher consumer prices, less competition, and a worse overall product (example A: the last two Time Warner mergers with AT&T and Discovery).

But only one of these two options leads to the potential for a Trump-affiliated authoritarian state television owned by a techno-fascist billionaire.see: Hungary), making it the bigger threat to people who love things like democracy. That’s not to soft-sell the damage Netflix could cause, which will be great (especially as they lower themselves to get approval), but one path is clearly worse.

So in the absence of blocking all media consolidation (which again won’t happen because the US is too corrupt to function), Democrats are most likely better served by finding ways to support Netflix’s bet on Warner Brothers assets. I’m not sure they’ll be strategically smart enough to realize that.

It’s worth noting that Netflix doesn’t want CNN and its pathetic ratings, and that CNN and Warner’s other cable channels will likely be spun off and sold anyway, giving Larry Ellison another chance to take over CNN, and like CBS, turn it into a right-wing propaganda mill whose primary function will be to cushion the increasingly unpopular autocrats.

Filed Under: consolidation, Larry Elson

Companies: CNN, Netflix, Forefront, Warner Bros. discovery