Netflix announced Thursday that it will not raise its bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, potentially paving the way for Paramount Skydance to swoop in and buy the company after a tense war between two media mega-corporations.
Netflix struck an $83 billion deal in December to buy most of WBD, positioning the streaming giant to absorb HBO and its streaming service HBO Max, while also acquiring the famed Warner Bros. film and television studios. That deal would have seen cable networks including CNN spin off into an independent company.
But Paramount Skydance, run by billionaire scion David Ellison, son of Oracle co-founder and Trump ally Larry Ellison, pursued a hostile takeover bid, claiming that an all-cash deal it proposed to buy the entire company for $30 per share was superior than Netflix’s $27.75 per share bid to buy most of the company.
On Tuesday, Paramount raised its bid to $31 per share, which Warner Bros. called a “superior proposal,” and that Netflix had four business days to respond. Still, the Warner Bros. board said that it was still recommending the Netflix transaction.
But on Thursday, Netflix said the deal was no longer “financially attractive.”
“The transaction we negotiated would have created shareholder value with a clear path to regulatory approval,” Netflix wrote in a statement Thursday. “However, we’ve always been disciplined, and at the price required to match Paramount Skydance’s latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive, so we are declining to match the Paramount Skydance bid.”
The move comes after Ellison’s Skydance in August merged with Paramount in an $8 billion deal that was heavily scrutinized by federal regulators. In October, Paramount Skydance, which owns CBS, bought conservative opinion journalist Bari Weiss’s website the Free Press for $150 million and named her editor in chief of CBS News.
Representatives for Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Skydance did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The White House and Justice Department, which would likely complete the antitrust review for any deal, also did not respond to requests for comment.
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