{"id":171764,"date":"2025-12-07T08:45:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-07T08:45:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/171764\/"},"modified":"2025-12-07T08:45:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-07T08:45:07","slug":"warner-bros-discovery-ceos-bidding-war-destroyed-the-initial-confidence-of-the-ellisons-but-dont-count-them-out-just-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/171764\/","title":{"rendered":"Warner Bros. Discovery CEO’s bidding war destroyed the initial confidence of the Ellisons — but don’t count them out just yet"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Zaslav just pulled off one of the greatest media mergers of the century<\/a> \u2014 but that doesn\u2019t mean he\u2019s done wheeling and dealing.<\/p>\n

The wily CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery has sold the media giant for $72 billion \u2014 more than doubling its value in a matter of months. He may get even more, depending on whom you talk to, capping one of the more momentous executive comeback \u00adstories in recent years.<\/p>\n

Before we get into why the cake isn\u2019t quite baked on WBD\u2019s future<\/a>, let\u2019s consider what just went down with Zaslav\u2019s mosh-pit-style bidding war, how he set some of the biggest media moguls against each other, ramping up the sale price of his company to levels no one thought possible.<\/p>\n

When all this began in September, WBD\u2019s stock was in the toilet, trading at around $12 a share, just above its one-year low of\u00a0$7.50. That\u2019s when Paramount Skydance saw value where no one did,\u00a0except maybe Zaslav; they offered $23.50 \u2014 or around $56 billion \u2014 for all of WBD, its studio, the HBO Max streaming service, as well as cable channels CNN, HBO and Discovery.<\/p>\n

It was thought to be a done deal. Paramount Skydance\u2019s deep-pocketed owners, Dav\u00adid and Larry Ellison, promised WBD shareholders all cash for an asset that was teetering, and a regulatory glide path through the Trump administration given the elder Ellison\u2019s close friendship with President Trump.<\/p>\n

Not quite. Zas\u00adlav is a prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of two of the best CEOs in recent history, Jack Welch and cable pioneer John Malone. That put him in line to become CEO of newly created Warner Bros. Discovery, a deal engineered by Malone, formed after the AT&T spinoff of Warner Media in 2022.<\/p>\n

\t\t\tMore From\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCharles Gasparino<\/p>\n

Money-losing assets<\/p>\n

Warner\u2019s assets included a major studio that lost money, an unprofitable streaming service, and old media cable channels like HBO, CNN, TNT and the Food Network. Zaslav was saddled with billions in debt. He took heat cratering shareholder value while paying himself millions.<\/p>\n

\"LarryLarry Ellison, chairman and chief technology officer of Oracle Corporation, sits in the Oval Office of the White House as President Donald Trump signs an executive order, Monday, Feb. 3, 2025, in Washington. AP<\/p>\n

What the market and media naysayers didn\u2019t appreciate is that he was scaling down a bloated operation and improving the Warner studio<\/a> \u2014 it became the first to surpass $4\u00a0billion in revenues in 2025.\u00a0He was also building up his streaming service, finally settling on a name, HBO Max, which is now the \u00adindustry\u2019s third largest.<\/p>\n

To his credit, David Ellison saw that potential early on \u2014\u00a0even as he was in the throes of trying to buy Paramount from the initially reluctant Redstone family, and then maneuvering through the odd maze of the Trump administration\u2019s regulatory apparatus.<\/p>\n

He saw that he could combine CBS with CNN, bail out Paramount\u2019s feeble streaming network with HBO Max, and supplement Paramount\u2019s studio with Warner\u2019s, gaining tons of intellectual property with some of the most iconic programming in recent history, such as \u201cThe Sopranos,\u201d \u201cHarry Potter\u201d and \u201cGame of Thrones.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCharlie Gasparino has his finger on the pulse of where business, politics and finance meet\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSign up to receive On The Money by Charlie Gasparino in your inbox every Thursday.\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

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Nearly the moment David and Larry swooped in with an initial offer for all of WBD three months ago, the larger bidding war was on. As the Post first reported, Zas began pitching a sale of some or all of the company to Amazon, Apple and others. In the end, he settled on a bidding contest among Comcast, Paramount Skydance and Netflix. Zas, as he\u2019s known in media and Wall Street circles, set his price target at $30 a share and deal participants scoffed: Who would pay $30 a share for something that traded at around $7 just a few months ago?<\/p>\n

Misplaced confidence<\/p>\n

The Ellisons appeared particularly confident they could underbid since the Trump administration, as we reported, wanted WBD in the Ellisons\u2019 hands. Trump and Larry Ellison are friends, Larry being a long time MAGA supporter. Plus the deal seemed the cleanest of all the bidders without much overlap to present antitrust worries.<\/p>\n

\"ParamountParamount Skydance CEO David Ellison speaks during the Bloomberg Screentime conference in Los Angeles on October 9, 2025. AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n

Trump was also said to like the idea of the Ellisons controlling CNN<\/a>, which he considers anti-MAGA. DOJ Antitrust sent out word it didn\u2019t like all those streaming customers \u2014 Netflix\u2019s 300 million plus another 100 million of HBO Max\u00a0\u2014 in one company.<\/p>\n

But the bids kept growing. Netflix\u2019s Ted Sarandos was sold on Zas\u00adlav\u2019s pitch to supplement his streaming empire with a top-flight studio that can produce namebrand, home-grown content. Now lusting for a deal,\u00a0Sarandos\u00a0met with Trump and developed a friendship he and Zaslav believe will mollify the regulatory hurdles. Comcast kept bidding up as well as its chief, Brian Roberts \u2014 despite his fraught relationship with Trump for owning the MAGA-hating MS NOW \u2014 tried to smooth things over with big gifts to build the new White House ballroom.<\/p>\n

The Ellisons recently came in at $30 a share; Netflix sealed the deal at $30.75.<\/p>\n

The Ellisons hate losing and are planning a counterattack; they might bid even more or go hostile, arguing\u00a0their all-cash offer is higher than Netfix\u2019s cash and stock even if its total price beats theirs by 75 cents.<\/p>\n

How\u2019s that for creating shareholder value?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"David Zaslav just pulled off one of the greatest media mergers of the century \u2014 but that doesn\u2019t…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":171765,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[138,11948,16650,156,15006,1094,111,139,69,72420,421,437,5942,3204],"class_list":{"0":"post-171764","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-david-ellison","10":"tag-david-zaslav","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-larry-ellison","13":"tag-netflix","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz","17":"tag-on-the-money","18":"tag-paramount","19":"tag-tv","20":"tag-warner-bros","21":"tag-warner-bros-discovery"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171764\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/171765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}