Paramount Skydance has secured money from three sovereign wealth investors to fund its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, according to a regulatory filing made on Tuesday.
The filing by Paramount Skydance with the Securities Exchange Commission did not outline how much the funds planned to contribute, but two people familiar with the investment said the total amount was around $24 billion. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, will contribute about $12 billion, and sovereign wealth funds for Abu Dhabi and Qatar will each contribute about $6 billion, the people added.
Paramount beat out Netflix in February to secure a $110 billion deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. Larry Ellison, the father of Paramount’s chief executive, David Ellison, has said the Ellison family will back roughly $45.7 billion in equity required for the deal. He has also said he would seek sponsors for that portion of the deal, though Paramount has not yet outlined who would be contributing, and at what amounts.
The deal is notable partly for its timing — more than a month after the start of the U.S. war with Iran. The war had kicked off speculation that investors in the region would shift their spending to food security and national defense.
“Focusing on domestic priorities doesn’t come at the expense of their global investments,” said Mazen Hayek, a Dubai-based media consultant.
The deal is also the latest sign that U.S. media and technology companies are increasingly willing to do business with Saudi Arabia, whose agents carried out the 2018 killing of the Washington Post opinion columnist Jamal Khashoggi. In September, the video game company Electronic Arts announced plans to go private in a $55 billion deal backed by Saudi Arabia’s investment fund. The private equity firm run by Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, was also an investor in the deal.
While Saudi investment in the United States had slowed amid public opprobrium after Mr. Khashoggi’s death, it has picked up in recent years. About $36.2 billion worth of deals were made in the United States last year, the most since 2016, according to the data platform Global SWF.
The sovereign wealth funds will have no governance rights in Paramount-Warner Bros., the filing said. And because their investment is small compared with the overall value of the deal, it will not automatically set off a review by the federal government for potential national security issues that can accompany foreign investments in U.S. companies.
Lauren Hirsch is a Times reporter who covers deals and dealmakers in Wall Street and Washington.
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