Paramount's $111 Billion Warner Bros. Discovery Takeover Is Officially Done

Warner Bros. Discovery no longer exists as an independent company. As of October 6, the media giant has been folded into Paramount and rebranded Skydance, capping a yearlong fight that pitted Netflix against a Paramount backed by Oracle chairman Larry Ellison's billions. The combined company now has annual revenue approaching $70 billion, according to TechCrunch, and owns a lineup that includes HBO, CNN, HGTV, Warner's film and TV studios, and Paramount's own streaming and broadcast assets.

Getting here took eleven months, a $111 billion price tag, a Netflix withdrawal, and a lawsuit from twelve state attorneys general. Here's how a struggling legacy media company turned into the center of one of the largest corporate deals in entertainment history.

How WBD ended up on the block

Warner Bros. Discovery has spent years buried under debt while cable subscriptions shrink and streaming competition eats into its margins. By October 2025, the pressure was bad enough that WBD's board started exploring a sale after fielding unsolicited interest from multiple suitors, TechCrunch reports.

Paramount and Comcast emerged early as the serious bidders, with Paramount initially seen as the frontrunner. But WBD's board ultimately decided Netflix had made the better offer. In December, Netflix agreed to pay $82.7 billion for Warner's film, television, and streaming assets, a deal that notably left out the cable networks and other pieces of the business.

That should have settled things. It didn't.

The bidding war

Paramount, run by David Ellison and bankrolled in large part by his father Larry Ellison, the Oracle chairman and the world's sixth-richest person, argued its roughly $108 billion offer for the entirety of WBD was the stronger deal, since it covered everything rather than just the studio and streaming business. Warner's board kept saying no, citing Paramount's existing debt load and unease over who was funding the bid: Saudi, Qatari, and Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth funds. The board's math showed that a Paramount deal would have saddled the combined company with $87 billion in debt, a risk it wasn't willing to take at the time.

Netflix moved to lock in its advantage. In January, it sweetened its offer into an all-cash deal at $27.75 per share, a move meant to reassure jittery shareholders and keep the process moving toward a close.

Paramount didn't back off. That same month, it sued for more information about the terms of the Netflix agreement. In February, it tried a different lever, offering WBD shareholders a $0.25-per-share "ticking fee" for every quarter the deal failed to close by the end of 2026, and promising to cover Netflix's $2.8 billion breakup fee if Warner walked away from that agreement.

Then came the move that actually worked. In late February, Paramount raised its bid to $31 per share, for an all-in valuation of $111 billion covering every piece of WBD, studios, HBO, streaming, games, and television networks like CNN and HGTV included. WBD's board found that compelling enough to extend talks with Paramount. Netflix, facing a bidding escalation it wasn't willing to match, pulled out entirely.

"The transaction we negotiated would have created shareholder value with a clear path to regulatory approval," Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters said in a statement on February 26. "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."

With Netflix gone, Paramount's offer became the only one left standing. The financial mechanics behind it are substantial: Paramount is taking on roughly $33 billion of Warner Bros. Discovery's existing debt, with the whole transaction backed by a $54 billion debt commitment from Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Citi, and Apollo Global Management, plus $45.7 billion in equity from Larry Ellison himself.

The political baggage

The Ellison family's role in this deal has drawn more scrutiny than the price tag alone would suggest. Larry Ellison is a major donor to Donald Trump, and under David Ellison's control, Paramount's ownership of CBS News has already drawn criticism for what reporters and critics describe as a friendlier posture toward the Trump administration. Reporting critical of the administration has reportedly been shelved or faced extra scrutiny from Ellison or Bari Weiss, the conservative commentator he installed to run CBS News, according to TechCrunch's reporting.

That history has made Warner-owned CNN's staff nervous about what comes next. Trump has a track record of pressuring news organizations tied to deals he has leverage over: before his FCC would sign off on Ellison's purchase of Paramount, CBS settled with Trump for $16 million. While Netflix was still in the running for WBD, Trump reportedly pushed the company to remove former Biden White House official Susan Rice from its board. He's also said publicly that he intends to bring CNN under control once new ownership takes over.

There's also the question of jobs. Ellison has already warned of significant staff reductions ahead, and critics have raised concerns about layoffs and wage cuts across the combined company.

The regulatory fight

A deal this size was never going to sail through without a fight. Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Richard Blumenthal flagged concerns to the Justice Department's Antitrust Division months before the deal closed, warning that a combined Paramount-Warner could gain enough market power to push up consumer prices and squeeze out competition.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta weighed in directly on February 26, the same day Netflix exited the bidding, stating that the merging companies "have not cleared regulatory scrutiny" and that California's Department of Justice had an open investigation into the deal. A day earlier, a coalition of eleven state attorneys general had urged the DOJ to review the merger over worries it would hurt competition and raise subscription costs.

The Justice Department approved the deal anyway in June. That didn't end the legal fight. On July 13, a coalition of twelve state attorneys general, led by Bonta and joined by Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Washington, filed suit to block the merger, arguing it would reduce competition and harm movie theaters, cable distributors, and viewers. U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín responded by issuing a 14-day pause on the deal.

The pause didn't hold. In late September, a judge approved the merger, clearing the final obstacle and setting up the October 6 close.

What comes next

With the paperwork done, the combined company now operates as Skydance, pulling in close to $70 billion a year in revenue. The streaming side of the business is next on the list: Paramount+, HBO Max, and Discovery+ are all slated to eventually merge into a single service, though TechCrunch's reporting doesn't yet detail a timeline for that integration.

What happens to CNN, and to the thousands of employees across both companies facing the layoffs Ellison has flagged, is likely to be the next chapter critics and regulators watch closely. The deal is closed. How it reshapes the people and programming inside it is still playing out.