December 15, 2025 | Media | North America | Active
Event-driven funds anticipate that, throughout 2026, an anticipated takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) will prove to be a complex, headline-grabbing, and potentially lucrative transaction for investors. Early speculation that WBD might be acquired at $30 per share looked initially unrealistic, given that the stock had traded at barely a third of that level until a bidding war erupted. Nevertheless, what began as WBD CEO David Zaslav’s aspirational sale price has now been overtaken by events, and the company is now contemplating two very different proposals despite having already undertaken what seemed to have been a thorough sale process - a higher, unsolicited whole-company acquisition by Paramount Skydance (“Paramount”), and lower-valued but agreed, partial sale to Netflix after a spin-off is executed. With one week to go before WBD’s 22-Dec-25 deadline to decide which bid it will endorse and recommend to shareholders, this report compares the deal terms and underlying risks the board and investors will need to weigh: headline valuation versus deal structure, financing capacity versus balance-sheet impact, and the very different regulatory and political exposures. At a high level, the Paramount offer is not only higher but also appears more executable from an antitrust standpoint. There are still some nuances, however, among them the precise assets each suitor would buy, CFIUS and broader foreign-influence optics given Middle Eastern sovereign financing, and FCC/media-plurality sensitivities tied to major news assets, notably CNN. Even so, a straightforward, all-cash offer for the entire WBD, combined with the ...
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