Ignore the Entertainment Companies

Takeover? On Friday, streaming giant Netflix announced an $83 billion deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, a deal agreed to by both boards. Then on Monday, Paramount launched a hostile takeover bid, in competition with Netflix, to try to secure Warner Bros. as its own. Paramount went straight to shareholders, circumventing the board, and it’s not clear how any of this will shake out.

“Paramount said it would pay $30 per share in cash, valuing the company at around $108 billion, including debt,” per The New York Times. “It said it was going to shareholders because the board of Warner Bros. Discovery is ‘pursuing an inferior proposal’ that would lead to ‘a challenging regulatory approval process.'”

Paramount is helmed by David Ellison. The company has been gobbling up others for a while; Showtime, CBS, Nickelodeon, and Skydance, among other brands, all fall under the Paramount umbrella. It recently made headlines for bringing Bari Weiss’ media upstart, The Free Press, under the CBS brand.

Ellison seems to believe it is unlikely that regulators will approve the Netflix bid, but it’s not totally clear what would make Paramount’s chances all that much better. Perhaps more importantly for libertarians: It’s not clear at all why regulators should care about this, how any of this rises to the level of necessitating government intervention, or what sort of consumer welfare standard is being applied here. How on Earth would consumers (who are voluntarily paying for these streaming services, are freely able to choose to take their business elsewhere, and have no right to inexpensive movies and TV) be grievously hurt by either of these acquisitions?

A lot of critique has fallen along these lines, but honestly, I have the hardest time caring about this:

So if paramount wins, Larry Ellison and his son will control TikTok, Warner bros studios, Paramount Pictures studio, CBS, CNN all of HBO and Paramount plus streaming library. They would also control almost every major cable channel. They would have distribution that is possibly…

— Joseph Carlson (@joecarlsonshow) December 8, 2025

Some critics have said that one media conglomerate controlling so much cable news presents a problem. (Paramount’s acquisition would involve CNN being thrown in, whereas Netflix’s offer excludes CNN, meaning the channel would spin off and be on its own.) But this isn’t a very good argument: You think CNN is some bastion of reliability? Recall the infamous chyron:

CNN chyron: pic.twitter.com/dfP3N8OnsQ

— Joe Concha (@JoeConchaTV) August 27, 2020

Perhaps most important is a point Matt Welch made on yesterday’s Reason Roundtable (on which I guested): DOES ANY NORMAL PERSON ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT THIS? It’s just really hard to see how people’s lives will be made substantially better or worse by such entertainment-company consolidations.

Scenes from New York: Full article here. Yes, it’s as ridiculous as it sounds.

So many columns in the NY Times should have a “*does not apply to people without rich parents” disclaimer. pic.twitter.com/x3guDjpmed

— Karol Markowicz (@karol) December 8, 2025

QUICK HITS

• A wise man once said: “Ones, fives, 10s, 20s, work your way up to the big face hundreds.” It’s our FINAL DAY OF WEBATHON (in case you haven’t heard), and we are so grateful for every gift you can muster (and every word of praise you might want to send my/Reason Roundup‘s way).
• “In September, the Luxor participated in the ‘Fabulous Five-Day Sale,’ a massive weeklong initiative launched by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, offering cut-rate deals on restaurants, resorts, and shows across the city. The goal was to coax lapsed vacationers back to America’s sanctum of indulgence, greasing the wheels of a hospitality sector that’s struggled all year long. More to the point, it was a tacit admission that something in Las Vegas had gone awry,” writes Luke Winkie for Slate. “What’s ailing Vegas might be harder to quantify than any material factor—closer to spiritual rot than pure economic tumult. Multiple generations of Americans have been socialized to believe that a mecca of cheap, dirty pleasures awaits in the wastelands of southern Nevada. And for a long time, that was basically true. The mythology of Las Vegas is all-day buffet counters as big as football fields, of David Copperfield tickets that cost the same as a cup of coffee, of indoor cigarettes and comped drinks and the irresponsible ideas those forces can summon in tandem. Las Vegas took your money with gracious respect for your degeneracy, gouging you sweetly and slowly. The magnitude of excess saturated time itself. Somehow, no matter how much you lost at the casino—and you will lose at the casino—it always felt as if you got your money’s worth.”
• “Donald Trump’s decision to allow Nvidia Corp. to sell advanced chips to China marks more than just a shift in US tech policy. It also raises questions about how far he’ll go to steady ties with Xi Jinping,” reports Bloomberg. “The Republican leader granted America’s most-valuable company permission on Tuesday to export its high-end H200 chip to China, watering down years of US national security safeguards. While he pledged Nvidia’s top products would remain off bounds, the move gives China access to semiconductors at least a generation ahead of its best technology.” The U.S. government will get a 25 percent cut from each of the chip sales.
• The Kushner mystique
• “A magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck near northeastern Japan on Monday night, injuring multiple people and triggering tsunami alerts and evacuation orders for thousands of residents,” reports Axios.
• Alt headline: New $25 minimum wage proposal threatens to destroy every single D.C. restaurant.
• I’m so grouchy that Jimmy Kimmel has become our modern #Resistance hero. He seems like a nice enough guy, but late-night comedy mediocrity is so awful to reward. Let the man retire! Send him to a nice farm upstate.

Scoop: @jimmykimmel has extended his deal at Disney/ABC for another year. He will host Jimmy Kimmel Live until at least May 2027.https://t.co/nTm2n4oC2C

— Lucas Shaw (@Lucas_Shaw) December 8, 2025