Given Warren's portfolio, any such investment would amount to a rounding error.
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Media Companies Are Ready to Sell. Does Anyone Want to Buy?
- Thread starter davideduardo
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That's pretty much it. He could afford to invest in a dying medium (newspapers) a decade ago. This is no different, he can absorb this loss and it won't in any way diminish his body of work.
My take is it's better to be on the buying side than the selling side. The buyers get bigger, the sellers become irrelevant.
I think people thought Shari wanted to get bigger. That's why she pushed for the re-merging of CBS and Viacom. The two companies were too small individually to compete. So the assumption was the merger would get them the scale they needed to compete in the new marketplace. Turns out that 2+2=3. The combined company is worth less than the sum of its parts. That's what happens when big isn't big enough. Once again, the competitors aren't other media companies. It's the technology companies, for whom media is just a side-venture.
We've been saying this same thing about Audacy. They could do a merger with a cash-rich company, and that could change the dynamics. Same with Paramount. We know who the obvious players are. We don't know about the less obvious ones: The Saudi royal family or some crazy foreign company such as Sony or Vivendi. Bertlesman in Germany loves to buy American things. So there's even more to consider.
The problem here is that the obvious players for Paramount are that same 2+2=3 (or even a 2+2=22) scenario. Sure, you have a bigger company but a very good likelihood that it'll be a replay of ViacomCBS.
Or worse, it's exactly like the Audacy situation where a leader like David Field causes unintentional self-injury by throwing all CBS Radio management under the bus and boasting everything can be better being done under his way.
I think that's why everything is on hold. The real money isn't speaking yet.
The other variable we aren't considering is if the government breaks up all of the big tech companies.
It would have to be all of them. They can't play favorites. All get broken up.
Not gonna happen in an election year and not gonna happen the year after if the GOP has control of the White House and/or Congress.
I'm just throwing it out there. Repubs have a track record of not liking big tech, so don't assume they won't break them up.
I thought the current GOP hates big tech?
On principle, though right now they and Elon have a lovefest going on. Trouble is, it throws open the doors to re-interpret anti-trust and that puts a lot of their friends in other businesses in jeopardy if/when the other guys have the ball.
That is funny....didn't see the comment above me.
Don't get me started on this. They like Elon, but Elon isn't going to buy Paramount. Paramount isn't competing with Twitter.
They hate Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook. They're not thrilled about Netflix either. And they hate big media.
Right. But none of those companies are AT&T in 1980. There are no anti-trust violations at play here. So they'd have to re-draw the boundaries of what calls for a government-mandated breakup and that would put a lot of companies in other fields----many owned by big GOP donors---at risk.
Not gonna happen to one of 'em, much less two, three or all.
They hate big media, and yet they also want further deregulation on the local end so a company like Nexstar could be at the "39%" cap but have up to 68% nationwide coverage with their station portfolio. And Ajit Pai tried to grease the skids in 2017 with Sinclair Broadcast Group's attempt to get Tribune.
Guys, just start a different topic. This one is interesting enough
What do you mean by 1980? Don't you remember 2017?
What the DOJ AT&T-Time Warner Antitrust Suit Means for Consumers
The Department of Justice has sued to block the AT&T-Time Warner mega merger. Consumer Reports examines how this might impact consumers.
www.consumerreports.org
Why do they like Nexstar & Sinclair, but not AT&T?
It really doesn't matter. Both parties hate big tech and big media for different reasons,
This is more in relation to Sinclair: that company has had multiple flirtations with right-wing talking points in their station's local newscasts. They even employed a former Trump advisor to deliver "commentaries" mandated on all stations:
Sinclair drops Boris Epshteyn and other political analysts
Sinclair, which owns 193 stations in the U.S., said it wants to focus on local news and investigative journalism.
www.nbcnews.com
Plus there was this infamous 2018 stunt:
Watch: dozens of local TV anchors read the same anti-“false news” script in unison
Dozens of anchors. Same Sinclair script.
www.vox.com
The implications of having one company own so many stations, especially in middle America and delivering a product still largely trusted more across the board than of their network counterparts, are often ignored or glossed over, tbh. Nexstar and Gray are not on the level of Sinclair ethically (thankfully) but it's still asking for trouble.
I was asking a rhetorical question. Thanks for playing along.
Once again: Both parties dislike big media and big tech for different reasons.
If Paramount sells to anyone at anytime, there will be someone who will challenge it in court.
I knew it was rhetorical, I answered it for anyone who thought it was literal.
This is a near-certainty and would be the case regardless of the regulatory climate here. Any sale would have to get international approval. It also makes any theoretical timeline moot as this could drag on as long as the Activision-Blizzard merger did, which took nearly two years to consummate (mostly because of international challenges).
Now, the real question should be if Shari is willing to wait a potentially long time to close a deal.
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