Are the Billionaires Smothering HBO?
Slate Money
Slate Podcasts
4.1 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 21 March 2026
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week: The war in Iran has caused a dramatic spike in global oil prices. Felix Salmon, Elizabeth Spiers, and Emily Peck discuss the international repercussions of the oil shortage and how central banks are responding. And: With the dust settling on the Paramount-Warner Brothers deal (including a $700 million payout to David Zaslav for some reason), the biggest loser in the megamerger might be HBO. The hosts discuss how billionaire dealmaking and rebrand fatigue is hurting the network's reputation for edgy, prestige TV. And later: Reuters published a very long story “revealing” Banksy’s real name—which, Felix will tell you, has been public knowledge since 2008. So what was the point?
In the Slate Plus episode: Claude is not an accountant.
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Podcast production by Jessamine Molli.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. |
| 0:16.5 | I'm Felix Salmon of Bloomberg. I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios. |
| 0:21.6 | Hello, hello. I'm here with Elizabeth Spires of the New York Times. Hello. We are going to talk about oil this week, how it's very good for rubbing into your body and getting a suntan. No, not that kind of oil. We're going to talk about crude oil. We're going to talk about the global benchmark. We're going to talk about what's going on |
| 0:37.5 | with the straight-of-hormoos and the oil markets and whether it matters. We are going to talk about |
| 0:42.6 | David Zazlev, who's very rich, and what that means for the future of HBO. We are also going to |
| 0:48.4 | learn about what disco dance is, which is going to rhyme with Emily's number this week, which you really do need to stay to the end of the show because Emily has the best number ever. |
| 0:59.5 | We have another segment, which is basically just me ranting about fancy journalism. |
| 1:04.9 | It's a can't miss. |
| 1:05.9 | It's a car miss. It's Felix ranting. |
| 1:08.2 | It's all coming up on Slate Money. |
| 1:18.3 | Okay, so let's get into this. |
| 1:20.2 | Emily, how many stories have you written about oil in the past couple of weeks? |
| 1:24.5 | I don't have a count, but it's a lot. |
| 1:26.8 | I have written that Brent Crude Oil is the global benchmark in stories approximately 6,422 times. |
| 1:35.6 | And this is important. |
| 1:37.0 | Why? |
| 1:37.6 | Oil trades on a global market. |
| 1:39.4 | And if you take a bunch of oil off the global market, the price goes up because demand stays |
| 1:44.0 | constant for a while at least, and there's, the price goes up because demand stays constant for a while, |
| 1:45.5 | at least, and there's not enough supply to meet the demand. Therefore, the price rises. And when the |
| 1:50.4 | price rises, it's bad news bear. Price rises nobody likes in the U.S. because it means that |
| 1:56.7 | gas prices rise. We all know, we live through inflation. We know that gas price is a big |
... |
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