Donald Trump’s son-in-law is playing a secret role in trying to land a massive media merger which the president has said he will himself scrutinize.
Jared Kushner’s firm is part of a group backing a new $108.4 billion attempt by Oracle heir David Ellison, who just acquired CBS, to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, the company which owns Hollywood studios, CNN, HBO HGTV and a vast movie and TV back catalog. WBD would become part of Ellison’s Paramount group, which is largely backed by the vast wealth of his father, the Oracle founder Larry Ellison. Regulatory filings show the offer is underwritten by sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar.
The bid is a hostile takeover after WBD accepted a rival$82.7 billion offer from Netflix last Friday, which would give Netflix The Sopranos, Casablanca, Bugs Bunny, Harry Potter and Batman but leave cable channels such as CNN and the Food Network in a separate company.
Kushner’s private-equity firm, Affinity Partners, is part of the Hail Mary bid made early Monday, Axios first reported.
Paramount announced the all-cash offer in a press release on Monday, claiming Ellison’s offer would get approved by regulators more easily, a coded reference to his family’s Trump ties.
That came after the president said on Sunday during a red-carpet appearance at the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, D.C. that he would weigh in on the final decision. Additionally, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos went to Mar-a-Lago and established a relationship with Trump.
“That’s gotta go through a process, and we’ll see what happens,” Trump
“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. I’ll be involved in that decision.”
That puts Trump in the position of refereeing between on one side Ellison—a Joe Biden donor whose father is a Republican mega-donor—Kushner and the sovereign wealth funds of key Middle Eastern allies, and on the other side Netflix, Hollywood’s most powerful and successful company.
Ellison mounted a publicity campaign Monday, rushing on to CNBC to push what the company claimed in a statement was “a more certain and quicker path to competition.”
“I’m incredibly grateful for the relationship that I have with the president,” he told CNBC, of which Trump is a long-term viewer.
“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.”
He may have hit some turbulence already from Trump, who ranted on Truth Social Monday about Marjorie Talyor Greene appearing on 60 Minutes, accusing the new owners of being “as bad” as the previous ones for allowing the former ultra-loyalist a platform to attack him.
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.
At the same time Kushner, 44, who married Ivanka Trump in 2009, has been involved in high-profile foreign policy dealings during father-in-law’s second term.
In September, Kushner was credited with 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. He also flew to Moscow last month for botched peace talks with Vladimir Putin, walking away apparently empty handed.
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.
There are questions about any deal’s future even if Trump expresses approval. 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.
One winner has, however, been anointed: WBD CEO David Zaslav will become a billionaire under either scheme.
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