What's next at Paramount? Media experts Charlie Gasparino, Dawn Chmielewski and Sean McNulty share their thoughts.
Shari Redstone won battles against her father's girlfriends and Les Moonves, can she now steer Paramount to a positive end?
Shari Redstone has been getting some headspace in The Turks and Caicos archipelago as she considers how to sell National Amusements and land Paramount in a safe harbor while navigating around the threat of shareholder lawsuits.
She’s even taking advice from media business insiders who have visited her there, a source told me. Wall Street was expecting a blockbuster deal that was touted as almost done by all the main business outlets last week. On Tuesday Redstone pulled out, after six months of back and forth, sending the stock down 14% over the past five days.
When Rupert Murdoch put the Fox assets on the block in 2017, there was a frantic auction between Disney and Comcast which bid up the price, netting his family billions at the top of the market. Paramount’s major rivals are this time nowhere to be seen; instead an unusual collection of bidders have been conducting drivebys.
Four private equity firms have made efforts to reel in one of the last big Hollywood media conglomerates on the block. Redstone does not want to take the bait just yet. After all, who would want to give up status as one of the most powerful women in the media business, especially with Sun Valley just around the corner?
Henry Kravis’ KKR teamed with Gerry Cardinale’s Redbird Capital and Skydance. They struck out this week disappointing some executives who had been having early conversations about joining their new company in management roles.
Marc Rowan’s Apollo Global teamed with Tony Vinciquerra’s Sony Pictures Entertainment withdraw a potential offer but isn’t out of the picture yet and now Bain Capital is signaling a potential bid with their front man, Edgar Bronfman, the former vice-chairman of Vivendi Universal, which once housed valuable cable assets and the Universal film studio.
On The Media Mix podcast this week: Reuters’ Dawn Chmielewski; Fox Business’ Charlie Gasparino and The Ankler’s Sean McNulty, founder of The Wake Up newsletter, got us caught up on what’s going on here.
Skydance’s last minute effort to shift more of their offer money to the minority shareholders made Redstone see red. “Some say that Shari felt that this was a betrayal of trust,” Chmielewski told the podcast this week.
Sean McNulty gets into the details about the Oracle founder’s fortunes which had backed the Skydance offer for Paramount, “Larry Ellison’s the main backer here of Skydance. It's really essentially a lot of his money involved here. And that company got a valuation of $4 billion in 2022. This would have been a four to five billion dollar valuation on Skydance, which would have transferred over into equity and Paramount,” he says, “It would have been essentially a cash out for Larry Ellison, which now is also not happening.”
“The ‘For Sale’ sign’s been out for nine months now. And this is all that's come forward?” he noted. The regulatory environment may have counted out Paramount’s rivals like Warner Bros. Discovery and Comcast.
On the podcast, Fox Business’ Charlie Gasparino shares the dramatic twists and turns of the story that he’s followed for years and his reaction to the stunning end of talks on Tuesday, June 11, which meant we had to re-record this episode.
Gasparino wonders who’s going to want to deal with Redstone after this wild reversal and asks what Sumner Redstone, Shari’s father who built the company once known as Viacom and CBS, would make of it all? “She knows that her father’s legacy is melting. She’s holding properties that are worth less today than yesterday. And tomorrow it’s going to be worth even less.
Gasparino also shares details on the podcast about his new book, “Go Woke, or Go Broke,” and what Disney had to say to him.
With thanks to Executive Producer Jamie Maglietta, Ray Hernandez and all the folks at Situation Room Studios. Ask them about producing your podcast and have a listen to their other shows including Press Advance and One Decision.
Programming note: I’m in France at the Cannes Lions event starting Sunday, June 16. I’d love to connect about how you can work with The Media Mix. Cannes coverage this week is sponsored by Havas which has released a survey on attitudes to generative AI. You can read their surprising findings here.
