Ted Sarandos‘s White House visit today proved an exercise in real-time realpolitik for the Netflix co-CEO as Paramount won the multibillion-dollar bid for Warner Bros Discovery.
Usually Sarandos is such a good pitch man he can pretty much sell ice to polar bears, but not Thursday and not at the White House of David Ellison‘s “good friend” Donald Trump.
Caught between a rock and a MAGA place today in his visit to chilly DC, Sarandos’s efforts to win over Team Trump were overshadowed by fast moving events back in LA as Paramount scored the winning and pricey bid for WBD. In many ways, if you look at the timeline, it looks the fix was in even before Sarandos walked up to the security checkpoint at the Executive Mansion this afternoon.
Just as Sarandos was sitting down for meetings with White House staffers and Department of Justice officials at just after 1 pm PT, his good buddy David Zaslav and the WBD board revealed that Paramount’s latest $31-per-share offer was now a “company superior proposal” and in essentially pole position for the company
Giving Netflix four days to react with what many assumed would be a raising of its $83 billion bid for the studio and streaming assets, that missive landed in most people’s inboxes at 1:18 pm PT. Less than 90 minutes later, Netflix sent out its out note at about 2:45 PM, saying they were out of the running. “We’ve always been disciplined, and at the price required to match Paramount Skydance’s latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive,” said a statement from Sarandos and co-CEO Greg Peters.
The shocking retreat was apparently signed off on by Sarandos while he was still at the White House, well-placed sources tell me. However, insiders at the streamer say he had exited the building by the time the release went out.
Either way, it was a rare knock back on the heels for Sarandos.
“I don’t know if it was pre-planned, but the timing was brutal,” an Oscar winning producer said as the news spread around town that tech offspring Ellison had succeeded in snagging his second iconic studio in less than two years even after it looked like lock was in and so were the WBD board votes for Netflix. “And so embarrassing for Ted, to be at the White House,”
Unlike NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s surprise trip to the Oval Office today, there was no face-to-face Thursday for Sarandos with Donald Trump.
A chat between the two men, who have met many times and have a decent professional relationship by all accounts, certainly didn’t seem expected with more recent words from POTUS,. Trump has been on the warpath since February 21 to get ex- UN Ambassador and Netflix board member Susan Rice. The Obama and Biden staffer said on a podcast recently
After a weeklong re-engagement and subsequent extension between WBD and Paramount that saw some shine of what many saw as a fading deal, all the pieces fell into place for Ellison — at least for now.
The reality is this isn’t really over.
Among the basic complications of merging the two companies, there are still regulatory hurdles, especially from Blue State AGs like California’s Ron Bonta, and there will be some hard math for all as the sheer scale of the huge debt of close to $50 billion Paramount-WBD will be taking on move to the fore. Then, as Sarandos and others warned and as we saw when David Zaslav melded Warner Bros and Discovery together back in 2022, there will be layoffs. There will be a lot of layoffs as Paramount, which has TV muscle packs on the studio and streaming pounds WBD carry and all the overlap that will result.
Also, having flown right back to LA after attending Trump’s record breaking long February 24 State of the Union speech. Ellison could find himself back in DC sooner than expected.
A previously scheduled March 4 Senate subcommittee antitrust hearing could still go forward with Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) already calling for Ellison to come to DC to testify. The Paramount CEO had declined earlier this year to appear before the Senators, even as Sarandos himself showed up for a MAGA roasting on February 4. Now, even with Sen, Mike Lee (R-UT) and other Republicans clearly on Team Paramount, Ellison may have to answer some questions in front of the cameras.
All of which is to say, as the bubbly flows tonight down at Paramount’s Melrose lot and the parking lot empties out at WBD’s Burbank HQ this may be the beginning of the end game, but it is not the end.