Paramount Skydance has yet to formally approach Warner Bros. Discovery with a hotly anticipated buyout offer – worried that it could be used by the latter’s wily CEO David Zaslav to shop the company to any number of potential suitors, On The Money has learned.
It’s been nearly two weeks since news first broke that Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, backed by the deep pockets of his father, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, intended to make an all-cash offer for Warner Bros. Discovery.
The buyout bid – which would kick off talks for a merger that insiders say could be worth more than $50 billion – was seen as imminent. And the Ellisons certainly have the money, with the old man now ranking as the world’s second richest with a net worth of $370 billion.
The bid also was to serve as an indication of the grand ambitions the Ellison’s have for building a media empire since it would come just after they finished their $8 billion purchase of Paramount.
Yet since that flurry of reports, it’s been mostly radio silence. Sources close to Skydance tell The Post that the Ellisons and their partners at Redbird Capital are worried about how best to approach Zaslav; they don’t want to do a hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery and they are keenly aware he wants a bidding war.
“Right now they are drawing up plans on how to approach Zas,” one media insider with knowledge of the matter says.
The talk inside Skydance is possibly to reach out to media mogul John Malone, Zaslav’s longtime mentor and business partner, to plead their case to Zaslav. Malone leans right in his politics and Larry Ellison is a major supporter of President Trump.
Malone is also a major shareholder of Warner Bros. Discovery through his company Liberty Media. He supported the merger of Discovery with WarnerMedia that put Zaslav at the top of the media giant. It’s unclear, however, if Malone could or would attempt to persuade Zaslav to accept Ellison’s offer because he too benefits from a bidding war.
Meanwhile, people with knowledge of the matter say that the official approach to Zaslav could come either later this week or much farther down the road, as the Ellisons gauge whether other potential bidders for WBD are likely to emerge.
Zaslav, I am told, enjoys being in the catbird’s seat now; he is in the process of chopping the company in half, with a unit that holds his streaming and studio businesses, and one with his cable properties because he thinks he can get more money by selling the units separately, or if all else fails, he can more easily run two smaller operations.
He has received feelers of interest in at least the streaming and studio half of his company, including from Netflix and Amazon, my sources say. He privately scoffed at the recent leak to CNBC of Ellison bidding $22 a share to $24 a share price for the entire WBD as way too low because he believes he will have other bidders, my sources say.
A Skydance spokeswoman had no comment as did a rep for Zaslav.
As The Post has reported, Zaslav has hired Goldman Sachs to begin shopping his company, which is set to split into a stream and studio arm and a separate unit for its cable properties.
Zaslav was a veteran of NBCU before joining Discovery in 2006 as its CEO. He’s the chief architect of Discovery’s $43 billion merger with WarnerMedia in 2022, a spinout from AT&T to create Warner Bros. Discovery, or WBD as it is known on Wall Street. He took over WBD four years ago, and immediately needed to slash costs to pay down the mountain of debt used to combine the two companies.
His tenure has also seen controversy. He ended WBD’s relationship with the NBA because he didn’t want to pay up for the broadcast rights. He cancelled a series of projects including “Batgirl” because he doubted their commercial viability. He renamed HBO Max, the streaming service, Max, and then switched it back when the rebranding didn’t work. Shares of WBD languished.
But over the past year, Zaslav has begun to turn things around. His studio has begun to produce a steady stream of hits; HBO has become immensely profitable as well as its streaming service. For all the media talk about the low ratings of CNN, his cable news network is still very profitable and always creates buzz.
Wall Street analysts have been noticing the change and have been upping their price targets to a premium above WBD’s current price of nearly $20 that has been inflated by the Ellisons buyout speculation.
He wants a price closer to $40 a share, which might be why for all their money, the Ellisons have yet to make their offer.
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