President Donald Trump said he will be involved in his administration’s approval process for Netflix’s proposed $83 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, adding that the streaming giant’s strong market position “could be a problem.”
“They have a very big market share,” Trump told reporters at the Kennedy Center on Sunday. “When they have Warner Bros., that share goes up a lot. So, I don’t know. That’s going to be for some economists to tell and also — and I’ll be involved in that decision too. But they have a very big market share.”
Netflix beat out bids from media rivals Comcast and Paramount Skydance and announced a deal to buy much of the Warner Bros. Discovery portfolio on Friday, save cable channels that will be spun off into a new company headlined by news giant CNN. Paramount Skydance, whose chief executive David Ellison is the son of Oracle co-founder and Trump friend Larry Ellison, was interested in buying all of WBD.
Trump said Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO of Netflix, met him in the Oval Office last week. The president told reporters Sunday that Sarandos didn’t say what measures he was ready to take to get the merger approved.
“I met with Ted. I think he’s fantastic. I think, in the history of Hollywood, there’s almost nothing like what he’s done,” Trump said, likening Sarandos to Louis B. Mayer, co-founder of MGM, as an entertainment empire builder. “But it is a big market share, there’s no question about that. It could be a problem.”
Any deal with the size and potential impact of Netflix’s WBD purchase draws regulatory scrutiny from federal antitrust authorities. In its regulatory filing detailing the deal’s terms, Netflix offered a $5.8 billion breakup fee should the deal fall apart as a result of antitrust or other legal challenges. The Washington Post previously reported that Warner Bros. Discovery held talks with the Trump administration’s Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission as it considered potential buyers.
The purchase would not only put streaming giant Netflix in control of the Warner Bros. film and television studio and its vast library of past productions, but also make it the owner of HBO and streaming rival HBO Max. Netflix and Amazon Prime are the biggest players in the subscription video-on-demand market, where WBD’s HBO Max also competes for viewers. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
Netflix had an estimated 69 million paying subscribers in the United States — nearly triple the reach of HBO Max — in October, according to metrics from the data analytics start-up Antenna.
Netflix did not respond to a request for comment on Trump’s remarks.
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