Nilay Patel

Hello and welcome to Decoder.

I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems.

Today I'm talking about the bidding war for Warner Bros.

Discovery, which is the biggest story in the entertainment industry right now, and for good reason.

It has pretty much everything you could want in a buzzy Hollywood saga.

Big names, big money, big drama.

Right now, the winning bidder is Netflix.

The streaming juggernaut has so far won the bidding process for Warner Bros., offering $83 billion for the movie studios, but not the cable channels.

But Paramount Skydance simply won't go away, even though the official process is over.

The company has bid, bid again, and is now attempting a hostile takeover to the tune of $108 billion for everything that Warner has, including those cable channels.

Paramount is run by David Ellison, the son of Oracle co-founder and tech billionaire Larry Ellison, and I have to say, his whole vibe feels ripped straight from an episode of Succession.

This man is desperate to become a bona fide media mogul, using a combination of Paramount, his dad's ever-growing AI money,

and the good graces of the Trump administration to make it happen.

Caught up in the middle of all this are HBO, CNN, and Warner Brothers Pictures.

Despite world-class brand recognition, legitimate mega-hits, and incredible franchises, these companies have been so historically comically mismanaged under a long series of clueless corporate parents that the whole bundle has ended up sold, merged, or spun off into something new more times than anyone can really count over the past two decades.

Seriously, it is mind-boggling how badly these companies have been run over the past 25 years.

To help me make sense of all this, I wanted to talk with Julia Alexander, a Verge alum and now media correspondent at Puck News, who's one of the best in the business at analyzing corporate strategy, Hollywood, and what's next in entertainment.

Julia really helped me break down why Netflix wants Warner Brothers.

And my David Ellison seems to think he's got a better, or even different, strategy than current Warner Bros.

boss David Zasloff.