Donald Trump’s son-in-law is puppet-mastering Paramount’s $108.4 billion bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery.
Jared Kushner’s private-equity firm, Affinity Partners, is part of the Hail Mary after Netflix agreed to pay $82.7 billion for the media and entertainment conglomerate, beating out Paramount and Comcast after a monthslong bidding war, Axios first reported.
Paramount announced the all-cash offer in a press release on Monday, pitching it as the quicker path to regulatory approval (Netflix’s offer still requires regulatory signoff).
“WBD shareholders deserve an opportunity to consider our superior all-cash offer for their shares in the entire company. Our public offer, which is on the same terms we provided to the Warner Bros. Discovery Board of Directors in private, provides superior value, and a more certain and quicker path to completion,” said David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount, whose billionaire father is a major Trump backer.
The company’s press release didn’t explain exactly how the offer would be more efficient. But regulatory filings show the deal is backed by Ivanka’s husband, which is sure to instill more confidence among shareholders. The filings also show the offer is underwritten by sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
Kushner, who achieved billionaire status this year, launched his private-equity firm after leaving the White House at the conclusion of Trump’s first term. His success since has been helped, in part, by connections from that period that landed him lucrative deals for the firm.
This wouldn’t be the first time Kushner, 44, who married Ivanka in 2009, has pulled some strings during dad-in-law’s second term.
In September, Kushner was credited for negotiating the president’s Gaza peace plan, worked alongside countries including Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia—three countries that combined have given him more than $2.5 billion for his investment firm.
Trump-approved Ellison has also touted his own relationship with the president.
“I’m incredibly grateful for the relationship that I have with the president,” The Paramount head told CNBC on Monday.
“And I also believe he believes in competition. And when you fundamentally look at the marketplace, allowing the No. 1 streaming service to combine with the No. 3 streaming service is anticompetitive.”
For his part, Trump has also touted a similarly strong relationship with Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos. Last week, Bloomberg reported that Sarandos spent an hour with Trump at the White House, where Trump said Warner Bros. should sell to the highest bidder.
“That’s gotta go through a process, and we’ll see what happens,” Trump said on Sunday during a red-carpet appearance at the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, D.C.
“Netflix is a great company, they’ve done a phenomenal job. Ted is a fantastic man, I have a lot of respect for him… but it’s a lot of market share, so we’ll have to see what happens.”
The Netflix deal would hand the company—the onetime DVD-rental service—the Warner Bros. library and its intellectual property, including DC Studios characters, the Harry Potter franchise, HBO hits like Game of Thrones, and more than 100 years of films from the studio.
Lawmakers across the political spectrum have slammed the deal for the control Netflix would wield over the market. Republican Sen. Mike Lee, who heads the antitrust subcommittee, said the deal “should send alarm to antitrust enforcers around the world.”
“This potential transaction, if it were to materialize, would raise serious competition questions—perhaps more so than any transaction I’ve seen in about a decade… increasing Netflix’s dominance this way would mean the end of the Golden Age of streaming for content creators and consumers,” he wrote on X.
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