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Larry and David Ellison have all the money, and a boost from Trump. Now they're going to own Warner Bros.

One of the world's richest men, and his son, wanted to buy one of the most prestigious assets in the media world.

That's the important part about Monday's news: Larry and David Ellion's Paramount has settled a lawsuit brought by California and several other states, which sought to hold up Paramount's planned acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. With that out of the way, there are no longer any serious regulatory challenges to the deal. So the Ellisons can start finalizing their $111 billion acquisition in the very near future.

That means the Ellisons will have combined control of major media assets, including two movie studios, HBO, and TV networks, including CBS, CNN, and dozens more.

If you want to, you can dig into the details of the settlement to see what the Ellisons gave up to make this go away. The TLDR: Not much.

A little longer: Rob Bonta, the California attorney general who led the antitrust case, repeatedly said he wanted "structural" changes to clear a Paramount/WBD deal — something that would have required the Ellisons to jettison some part of their combined businesses. He didn't get any of that.

Instead, Bonta's main selling point is that he now has an "enforceable commitment" that the Ellisons' studios will make at least 30 movies a year — which is a pledge Ellison has been making publicly since April.

Perhaps that's why Bonta spent much of his press conference explaining why he was working hard on other antitrust suits, while conceding that he didn't get the outcome he wanted here.

"I didn't believe these two companies should merge," he said Monday. "I still don't."

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It's happening anyway. And it reinforces why many observers thought a year ago that Larry and David Ellison would end up owning Warner Bros. Discovery before they'd even formally announced their plan to buy WBD.

Larry Ellison was one of the richest men in the world (he's currently worth an estimated $200 billion — down considerably from $400 billion last fall, when his Oracle stock was flying on an AI-fueled spree, but still enough to be ranked No. 7 on Bloomberg's list of the world's billionaires).

Larry Ellison is close to Donald Trump: "We have a good relationship with the administration," his son David acknowledged a year ago — and Donald Trump treats federal agencies like the Department of Justice as an extension of himself. So if Donald Trump wanted regulators to sign off on a Paramount-WBD deal, they would.

Dive deeper

  • One of the world's richest men, and his son, wanted to buy one of the most prestigious assets in the media world.
  • That's the important part about Monday's news: Larry and David Ellion's Paramount has settled a lawsuit brought by California and several other states, which sought to hold up Paramount's planned acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. With
  • That means the Ellisons will have combined control of major media assets, including two movie studios, HBO, and TV networks, including CBS, CNN, and dozens more.
  • If you want to, you can dig into the details of the settlement to see what the Ellisons gave up to make this go away. The TLDR: Not much.
  • A little longer: Rob Bonta, the California attorney general who led the antitrust case, repeatedly said he wanted "structural" changes to clear a Paramount/WBD deal — something that would have required the Ellisons to jettison some part of
Read the original article on Business Insider ↗

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