2026년 2월 28일 · Unknown · financial · 출처 Yahoo Finance
Paramount Skydance (PSKY) officially won the bidding war to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) after Netflix (NFLX) declined to raise its offer.
LightShed Partners media and technology analyst Rich Greenfield sits down with Morning Brief host Julie Hyman to discuss Warner Bros.'s challenging history of mergers and acquisitions (M&A), highlighting what Paramount CEO David Ellison needs to do to beat the curse.
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Video Transcript
00:00 Julie
It feels to me though like a case of um sometimes the winner is the loser. In other words, Netflix didn't win the bidding war, but, you know, maybe it's going to be benefited from not having completed this deal at the end of the day.
00:14 Speaker B
Well, well, look, Julie, you and I have done this a really long time. If you think back over the years, AOL bought Time Warner, it was toxic. AT&T bought Time Warner, it was toxic. Discovery bought Time Warner and it was sort of toxic. So, like, can Paramount break that streak? I mean, this has been an asset that as it keeps getting traded around, has not been good for the buyer, right? Like, this has certainly been problematic over the course of history. You can go back quite a long time. You know, this chart you have on the screen is making me laugh actually, you know, the fact that that AOL deal was back in 2001. So the the reality is, um, Paramount is now a show me story, right? No one has ever, you know, Skydance was a relatively small company. You know, you're talking about a company that was, you know, several single-digit billions of dollars of value. They bought Paramount. Now they're buying Warner Brothers. I mean, they're sort of going from single-digit billions to 100 billion over the course of two years. No one in the media space has ever done what Skydance and David Ellison is trying to do. Now they have a lot to prove. And, you know, they've got to figure out how they bring leverage down because being highly levered in the media space has never been a good thing. You know, they can try to delever through cash flow over time, but my guess is they're going to want to delever faster, whether that's an equity offering or selling assets, they are clearly going to want to delever fast.
02:18 Julie
Um, you know, and so and if we can put that screen back up that shows the history, I call it, you know, the Warner Brothers M&A curse maybe, a little bit tongue and cheek, but like, okay, so if the pressure is on, you know, all of those other entities, right? We're talking about huge entities with, you know, in some cases a lot of resources from the Time Warner communications merger, AOL, AT&T, then of course, uh the current um iteration of it. Is Paramount the one to get it right? Like, what what is it about Warner Brothers that it couldn't work in any of those forms?
03:07 Speaker B
You know, it is it you may not always, I mean, first of all, remember, there is a lot of linear TV. Linear TV for, you know, has certainly has its challenges. I mean, Julie, we're talking on streaming with Yahoo finance. So, you know, I don't want to say you are the problem, but I could certainly point at you and say this is part of the problem, right? You're competing against CNBC, you're competing against linear TV. And so, you know, in many ways, you know, look at Disney stock. I mean, we could look at Disney stock. It's down over the last 11, 12 years. I mean, this is not legacy media. Linear linear television is not a good business. It is certainly facing very, very stiff headwinds that are getting stronger. And so from that standpoint, you know, I I think it's less about who the buyer is, and it's been more of that there are real challenges facing linear TV. And look, leverage has never been a good thing in this space. That was part of the problem when, you know, when Time Warner or Warner Media merged with Discovery a few years ago. Zaslav admits leverage was a problem and it definitely became a problem quickly. And so it'll be interesting to see can Paramount get the leverage to a comfortable place quickly, because being levered, I mean, the goal right now, you need to be swift and nimble and be aggressive in investing. That's hard to do when you're levered. And so I think for Paramount, can David Ellison really rapidly delever this company? That's going to be the number one focus of investors, I think over the next 18 months.
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