Hey, everybody. It's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the Bullwork. I'm joined by Sunny Bunch,

Catherine Impel, and of course JV Allen is pinball machine. We are here to talk about one of the

more remarkable acquisitions, media acquisitions that I can ever recall following. It's not done

yet. I just want people to understand. It's not done yet, but Paramount looks to be in a place where they are going to acquire Warner Brothers

and all of its properties for a boatload of money.

Sonny, who wrote about this for us on the substack page today.

You'll be getting it in your inboxes later.

You called it the most grotesque and un-American

of transaction or acquisition processes that you've seen. Why don't you just lay out what exactly

happened, why we are in this place? Yeah, so the 30,000-foot view here is that for a while now,

Paramount has been trying to buy uh warner brothers they want

they want to get access to the IP they want to get access to the cable nets they want to consolidate

and grow paramount plus and so they offered a series of escalating bids and Netflix didn't bite

or i'm sorry um warner brothers didn't bite Warner brothers didn't bite and then Netflix kind of

swooped in with a

Godfather deal of like, we will give you lots and lots of money and you'll get to keep your

cable nets to do whatever you want with. You can spend those off into a separate thing. Paramount,

you know, came back with a couple of sweeteners that basically said, we will be able to get this

through the regulatory process. And this is where things start getting hinky because Paramount

Skydance, which is backed by the Ellison family, basically said, hey, we are, we have good connections

with the Trump folks. Believe it or not, we have really good connections there.

And we can make sure this thing gets through.

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