Paramount Falsely Threatens To Leave California After State Challenges Merger

from the taking-my-ball-and-going-home dept

Paramount is now threatening California regulators that they’ll be taking their ball and going home (to Texas? Israel?) after California and 11 other states filed an antitrust lawsuit against the company’s unpopular $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers.

Paramount leaked word of the nonexistent move to Semafor, which dutifully parroted the empty threat:

“Ellison’s confidantes have pushed him to consider moving its corporate headquarters and reallocating much of its $30 billion in planned spending outside the state if California Attorney General Rob Bonta were to sue to stop the merger, according to people familiar with the discussions.”

Much like those NYC billionaires who threatened to leave the city if Mamdani won, then didn’t. Or those Silicon Valley billionaires who threatened to leave California over (insert minor inconvenience or regulatory accountability effort) and head to Texas, then didn’t.

Paramount officials have been telling California that the merger will create vast untold new creative Utopias should it be approved, but few reasonable people believe them. In part because these mergers (especially involving Warner Brothers) never go well for anybody other than they highest echelons of the extraction class. And in part because of the lack of competence everyone is seeing from the likes of Bari Weiss at CBS.

As I’ve discussed at length, the $111 billion merger is going to be an ugly parade of debt, layoffs, higher consumer prices, foreign influence peddling, right wing agitprop, Trump appeasement, product quality declines, negative market health impacts, and overall chaos.

That’s assuming it gets approved. And while the Trump DOJ has unsurprisingly rubber-stamped the media domination dreams of close Trump ally Larry Ellison, a dozen states filed lawsuit last Monday, stating that further media consolidation at this scale would harm competition and violate Section 7 of the Clayton Act.

Oregon’s AG office recently stated Paramount refused to comply with requests for documents related to the merger. Paramount seems particularly cagey about requests for documents about how the company has specifically interacted with the Trump administration to grease the rails for quick and easy merger approval despite ample, obvious problems.

Much like when Paramount claimed opposition to their merger was “antisemitic,” you can sense a certain desperation among execs worried about these potential state antitrust challenges.

Even if the state opposition fails to block the deal outright, the lawsuits could introduce new delays that could be problematic for the debt-riddled transaction and Ellison, who is extremely far out over his skis on AI ahead of a potential bubble burst. Approval or not, history suggests it’s very likely that this all ends with a lot of sad whimpering — one way or another.

Filed Under: antitrust, california, consolidation, hollywood, layoffs, mergers, oregon

Companies: paramount, warner bros.