Ellison’s Merger Danger Zone
As billionaire media and technology titans descended on Sun Valley this week aboard private jets for Allen & Co.’s annual retreat—an exclusive gathering David Ellison was expected to join—executives back at Paramount’s Melrose headquarters were confronting the biggest threat yet to his $110 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery.
While Ellison’s blockbuster acquisition sailed through the Justice Department with little resistance from a friendly Trump administration, a coalition of states led by California and New York is now preparing to sue as soon as next week to block the deal, Reuters first reported. At the same time, Oregon’s attorney general has asked a court to halt the mega-merger while it investigates Paramount’s lobbying of the Trump administration, and the U.K.’s media regulator said she was concerned about “a sufficient plurality of views in news media” if the deal were to go through, saying she was “minded to intervene.”
The moves present the biggest threat yet to the colossal media merger that would unite two of Hollywood’s biggest studios, place CNN and CBS News under the same corporate roof, and put the Ellisons at the helm of a media empire that would arguably eclipse even the Murdochs in scale and reach. In conversations with Status, legal and M&A experts said the emerging challenges have the potential to…
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