Netflix Reportedly Greased the Skids for Its Warner Acquisition by Yukking It Up with Trump

The principle subtext of the unpleasant announcement on Thursday that Netflix deliberate to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery in a deal price $82.7 billion was that Silicon Valley continues to be grabbing all it will probably amid the continuing looting of tradition by Massive Tech. That subtext might have overshadowed some extra, equally nauseating subtext that anonymous sources have confirmed to Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw: that if it succeeds, it would probably be partly the product of a private lobbying effort aimed toward successful President Donald Trump’s approval.

That push reportedly included Netflix management visiting the White Home for a gathering with Trump that lasted for hours, however solely after a chummy dinner at Mar-a-Lago virtually a yr earlier.

To refresh your reminiscence, Netflix is shopping for an enormous cache of cultural properties on high of the streaming infrastructure at Warner Bros. Discovery, together with HBO Max. Only for starters, it locks down 4 of essentially the most oft-cited “greatest films of all time,” Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Blade Runner, and Gone with the Wind. Identical goes for TV. Netflix will now personal The Sopranos, The Wire, and my private favourite media property in existence: Curb Your Enthusiasm.

By absorbing the perfect of legacy showbiz, Netflix has seemingly no lands left to overcome with out turning into such an apparent monopoly that no presidential administration might probably tolerate it. And Trump is traditionally more of a monopoly hawk than earlier Republican presidents. So such conferences, grubby or not, had been in all probability inevitable.

In keeping with Bloomberg’s reporting, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos sat down with Trump on the White Home in mid-November to softly broach this, and make his firm’s case, and through the assembly Trump is claimed to have advised Sarandos that Warner Bros. should go to the very best bidder—which will need to have been music to Sarandos’ ears. Apparently Sarandos claimed on the time that Netflix ranked fifth or sixth on the listing of greatest TV distributors, and that with this deal, it will turn into as large as YouTube.

However apparently Sarandos had set the stage for the success of this dialog virtually precisely a yr in the past, at a December 2024 Mar-a-Lago dinner—simply after Trump gained the presidential election, in different phrases. That was when Silicon Valley leaders like Mark Zuckerberg had been trekking to Florida to kiss Trump’s ring earlier than he was sworn in.

Sarandos, Shaw writes, “had deep ties with the Obama and Biden administrations” as a result of he’s married to Nicole Avant, who was Obama’s ambassador to the Bahamas. It’s primarily on this Obama-centric context that Sarandos had schmoozed with world energy gamers, so in his view he wanted to repair that. Per Shaw, “the 2 traded tales and struck up a bond over their childhoods and their shared love of leisure.” And Trump and Sarandos nonetheless chat, apparently.