(Photo by Aleksander Kalka/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
NurPhoto via Getty Images
As Bill Maher rather wryly told his audience Friday night while wrapping his last show of the fall, by the time Real Time with Bill Maher returns to HBO in late January, he and his staff will have yet another new owner. That’s if the new owner still wants Maher, a heterodox political satirist with a gift for enraging both sides of the aisle. So, we’ll see.
Paramount Skydance, Comcast and Netflix all submitted bids Friday to buy part or all of Maher’s current boss, Warner Bros. Discovery. WBD already was unwinding its last bad merger, which would have created a smaller Warner Bros. collection of studios and streaming services separate from a batch of fading cable networks further hobbled by loads of debt.
No matter to $PSKY’s David Ellison, who already lobbed three offers to buy the whole thing before Friday, and again made the only offer to buy all of WBD. WBD’s board said it expects to announce a sale decision by mid-December.
Maher’s comment, though, was a startling reminder of the multiple ill-considered, ultimately failed takeovers and financial engineering machinations that have dogged one of Hollywood’s most storied media companies for the past quarter century. The workers at the company are facing yet another set of dislocations, sell-offs, reorganizations, and layoffs, er, “synergies” as their company navigates its newest “normal.”
That anyone can get a movie or TV show made amid this unending disruption and uncertainty is a testament to the company’s bench of creative talent and will to make stuff that millions of people will see and love. Good thing. It’s pretty easy to predict more disruption and distraction ahead for at least a couple of years, whomever wins the bidding. It’s nothing new for the long-time employees who’ve somehow soldiered through, and remained employed through a quarter century of dumb ideas.
The financial mayhem began less than three weeks into the new millennium, on Jan. 20, 2000. Time Warner and Internet power AOL (remember them?) announced a stock swap initially valued at $165 billion. As AOL shares plummeted amid the Internet boom’s broader collapse, so did the deal’s value. By the time the merger closed a year later, the deal value had dropped below $110 billion, down a full one-third. Oof. It’s still considered perhaps the worst merger in American business history.
Subsequent CEOs Jeff Bewkes and Richard Parsons needed just a few years to deconstruct the resulting monstrosity, pushing AOL out the door and onto an ice floe of technological and cultural irrelevance, along with separate deals to dispense with Time Warner Cable and Time-Life publishing. Time Warner – slimmed down to the film and TV studio, with HBO, CNN and other Turner cable networks – was back at the company’s center, a swaggering fountain of Oscar and Emmy winners and a jewel of Hollywood.
Then AT&T decided it needed to be in the movie business, for reasons that didn’t make sense even then. In 2016, the phone company said it would buy the movie and TV studio for $85 billion, plus another $25 billion or so in assumed debt. The U.S. Department of Justice under the first Trump Administration sued to block the deal, and still AT&T persisted, winning in court and finally closing in mid-2018.
Time Warner became WarnerMedia, but AT&T was overloaded with $170 billion in debt after also buying satellite TV distributor DirecTV. Three years in, AT&T’s new CEO John Stankey (who’d overseen the original Warner deal before being promoted) was happy to sell most of WarnerMedia to Discovery Networks, an undersized and existentially threatened collection of cable nets known mostly for their reality TV shows.
The $43 billion reverse Morris trust spun off a merged company with an enterprise value estimated at $132 billion, but laden with $55 billion in debt. The new company debuted at a share price of $24 in April, 2022.
Now, we’re pretty much back where we started three years ago. Sale speculation has sent WBD shares back above $23, after sitting at half the debut price most of the past couple of years.
The most motivated possible buyer, and the one who would tie up all of WBD in a neat acquisition bow, is Paramount Skydance. CEO-owner David Ellison is backed by father Larry Ellison, the world’s second-richest man, and both are aligned with the Trump Administration, making a deal more likely to win approval. Comcast, by contrast, wants only the studios and streaming operations, but labors under Trump’s personal antipathy toward its owner and its MSNOW cable-news network.
Ellison fils has shown some conservative, or at least centrist, impulses, buying news site The Free Press for a very rich $150 million and installing co-founder Bari Weiss as “editor in chief” of CBS News, one of Trump’s many bete noirs. And ahead of the Trump Administration’s approval of the deal last summer, Paramount executives said the Late Show with Stephen Colbert would end next spring, when Colbert’s contract expires, a move almost certainly blessed by Ellison.
But Ellison also spent $1.5 billion to unleash South Park’s contrarian creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who’ve fired volleys of scorching satire and just plain rude mockery of Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance and other lampoon-ready members of the administration since June.
And $PSKY’s Comedy Central recently re-upped another frequent Trump satirist, Jon Stewart, to continue his work as a sometime on-air personality and overall show runner of The Daily Show.
So Maher – who enraged lefties by having dinner at the White House with Trump, and regularly includes right-wing notables such as U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) among his show’s many more-liberal panelists and interviewees – likely indeed will have the same gig this time next year. Same with This Week with John Oliver, whose nerdy, often comedic deep dives into crunchy policy issues keep winning Emmys.
But pity the workers elsewhere across WBD, regardless of who ends up in charge. Ellison already has presided over 2,000 layoffs, part of $3 billion in “synergies” from the just-concluded merger that created Paramount Skydance (on top of another 800 in the weeks before he took charge).
For WarnerETC’s future employees, expect more debt, more cuts, more layoffs, and more distractions for at least a couple of years to come. At least until everyone changes their mind again.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/dbloom/2025/11/22/as-warner-bros-bids-come-in-employees-face-another-new-boss/
