• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, March 2, 2026

Paramount, the studio that made “The Godfather,” made an offer Warner Bros. Discovery could not refuse -- and that was that.

In the end, money talked and Netflix walked.

By raising its offer for WBD last week by $1 per share -- from $30 per share to $31-- Paramount was adding another $2.479 billion to its previous offer, which itself represented increases worth billions.

WBD has 2.479 billion outstanding shares, according to StockAnalysis.com, including a public float of 2.37 billion shares.

This means that a lot of shareholders stood to make even more money from Paramount's latest offer.

As a result, WBD's confidence that its shareholders would ultimately accept the Board of Directors' recommendation to approve the Netflix deal took an abrupt nosedive. And suddenly, Paramount won.

For its part, Netflix folded up its tent and exited the scrum. “We've always been disciplined,” Netflix said in a statement.

“At the price required to match Paramount Skydance's latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive, so we are declining to match the Paramount Skydance bid,” Netflix said.

Paramount's pursuit of WBD -- led by Paramount CEO David Ellison -- was nothing if not tenacious.

At each stage of the drama, the deep-pocketed Ellisons -- David and his dad, Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison -- raised the ante.

Their decisions along the way to add cash and incentives worth billions of dollars to each of their offers seemed almost casual.

Dad happens to be worth an estimated $245 billion, so what's a couple of billion here and there?

Specifically, WBD weighed Paramount's newest offer against the offer it accepted from Netflix in December and determined after a day or two that it constituted a “Company Superior Proposal as defined in WBD's merger agreement with Netflix.”

So now what? WBD and Paramount line up pretty well when one looks at the assets that each of them owns. They both have streaming services; vast production facilities and capabilities; syndication units for licensing their formidable content to broadcast stations, basic cable networks and streamers; and portfolios of basic-cable networks.

WBD is the largest owner of basic-cable channels in the entire TV industry. These holdings are already an albatross for the company -- so much so that the company was planning to get rid of them by spinning them off into a separate company: Discovery Global.

But now, Paramount -- which has its own stable of cable channels -- is buying the WBD cable channels along with everything else (most notably, HBO Max and Warner Studios).

That means that the newly merged company will be saddled with even more basic cable networks at a time when that industry appears to be dying a slow death.

The two companies differ in broadcasting. Paramount owns a string of CBS TV stations in major markets, plus the CBS Network. WBD has no such ownership.

But both companies are in the news business -- Paramount with CBS and WBD with CNN.

Paramount is currently involved in efforts aimed at “blowing up” CBS News under the supervision of internet firebrand Bari Weiss.

Will Paramount take the same approach at CNN? The best answer right now is: probably.