Happy Friday,On Thursday, word of a potential bid by David Ellison's Paramount for all of Warner Bros. Discovery shook the media world. Today, let's make sense of why this is happening now. Paramount, who is backed by David's billionaire father and Oracle co-founder Larry, is clearly trying to merge its way into a next-generation media giant. A deal would catapult David further into the upper strata of the media elite, a tier he just entered with the completion of the merger between Paramount and Skydance. As our own Lucas Manfredi writes, we're hearing word of a bid now because Ellison is attempting to circumvent WBD's planned split later this year, allowing him to cleanly scoop up all the assets and get ahead of competing bidders like Comcast, Apollo Global Management and Sony Pictures Entertainment. Whether this gets the other companies remains to be seen. But it's clear there's still a lot more of this story to come. Roger Cheng PS: Jeffrey Katzenberg. Irving Azoff. Jerry Bruckheimer. All and more at TheGrill 2025. Subscribers get 40% off with WrapPRO40. 
While there's an argument to be made that the increased scale would make it easier for the combined company to compete against larger rivals like Netflix and Disney and the tech giants... 
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