Consolidations Are as Much a Threat as AI

11 Dec, 2025

Netflix is set to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, one of the largest movie and TV studios in the world. The deal is set an a staggering $82.7 billion.

Except, maybe not. The day after the announcement, Paramount counter-announced they were beginning the process of a hostile takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery to stop the Netflix acquisition. The attempt will dwarf Netflix’s offer, coming in at around $108 billion.

The kicker? Paramount’s takeover attempt has the backing of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) and Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, all but ensuring their success.

It’s Always Politics

Paramount is owned by David Ellison, son of Oracle founder and comic book super villain Larry Ellison. The Ellisons are the secret puppeteers of the far-right in the United States. Most recently they’re the architects of the Paramount/Skydance merger after a healthy bribe to Trump. They subsequently appointed a political commissar to run CBS News and fired Stephen Colbert for saying mean things about Trump.

Paramount getting Warner Bros. Discovery would be disastrous. Warner owns CNN, one of the largest news organizations in the United States. They also own Discovery, the largest science-focused TV network in the country. Beyond that, if/when successful, this takeover would also give them HBO Max to go with Paramount+. They’d get Cartoon Network, TBS, TNT, HGTV, and Food Network. They’d get all of DC, Harry Potter, the rights to Lego movies and video games, and countless beloved movie and TV franchises. They’d also get several video game studios like Avalanche, Rocksteady, Traveller’s Tales, NetherRealm, and all of WB Games’s studios.

All of that on top of what Paramount-Skydance already owns, like CBS, Miramax, Nickelodeon, MTV, VH1, Comedy Central, BET, The CW, and Paramount Music. This would create a massive monopoly on American movie and TV entertainment, one controlled by a major Trump ally that is already censoring news and creating state propaganda. This would also give Saudi Arabia major influence over US news and entertainment industries, a country famous for hating women, hating the LGBTQ+ community, and things happening.

There’s no reason to believe this hostile takeover won’t succeed. Paramount has many allies in the Trump Reich. The PIF have seemingly unlimited wealth and influence, and with Kushner personally leading the charge, it’s a done-deal.

But don’t think for a second that a Netflix acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery would be any better. Netflix has vowed to end movie theaters. They’re beyond incompetent at managing video game studios, going so far as to say WB’s video game studios are irrelevant to them. It would also give them control over the two biggest streaming services in the West. A monopoly of different stripes, but a monopoly nonetheless.

The Consolidation Bubble

You’ve no doubt seen talk of an “AI bubble” making the rounds. That is true, but there’s a second bubble right now that’s getting less attention; the consolidation bubble.

In the last five years we’ve seen tech companies, movie studios, video game developers, book publishers, and pharmaceutical companies swallowed whole by competitors. We can’t go a day without hearing about a record-breaking sale of one company to another.

Take that Saudi/Kushner purchase of EA. This unholy alliance purchased what was once the largest video game publisher in the world for a $55 billion. The PIF already own SNK and Niantic outright, and have invested in Nintendo, Take-Two, Activision Blizzard, Capcom, Nexon, Embracer, and Tencent. Now, they get to add to that EA, and all those WB studios, too.

Look at the studios involved in this deal. In 2024, Skydance bought Paramount for $8 billion. Warner Bros. Discovery was formed in 2022 when AT&T split off Warner Bros. (which it had just acquired in 2018 for $85 billion), which then went on to merge with Discovery that saw the new company get a ton of money, but also just as much debt.

In 2021, Penguin Random House tried to purchase Simon & Schuster for $2 billion, but the following year the deal was struck down by a US judge saying this would create a monopoly. Who was president back then?

Anyway, in a hilarious twist, Simon & Schuster was owned by none other than Paramount at the time, who instead went and sold the book publisher to a private equity firm for $1.6 billion instead. Oh, and in 2020 media conglomerate Bertelsmann purchased Penguin Random House for $675 million.

Japan’s Nippon Steel bought US Steel in 2023 for $15 billion. In 2020 AbbVie bought Allegran for $63 billion. In 2022 AMD bought Xilinix for $49 billion. In 2021 Salesforce bought Slack for $28 billion. I could go on, but I think you get the point.

Every time it results in the same thing: the executives get a fat payday and a golden parachute, while the people who work for the company and their customers suffer. Case in point; after Skydance purchased Paramount, they immediately laid off 2,000 employees.

Microsoft, after pinky promising not to lay off employees after being allowed to buy Zenimax for $7.5 billion and Activision-Blizzard for $68.7 billion in 2020 and 2022, respectively, laid off over 20,000 people in the following three years. They also raised prices of Game Pass as much as 50% and the price of the Xbox Series console itself.

In 2021, the House Oversight Committee found that AbbVie had inflated prices for two of its drugs for years. They also raised prices a further 7% on average in 2025.

Again, I can go on, but one thing is clear: mergers are bad for everyone except the wealthy. They’re creating monopolies, and more and more often, they’re being stripped for parts to create massive wealth funds.

Nowhere is this more apparent than Embracer Group, who spent years acquiring dozens of indie video game studios in the hopes of cashing out to the PIF, only for the deal to fall through. The result? You guessed it – thousands of layoffs, dozens of canceled games, and multiple studio closures.

Oh, and the rights to one of the most iconic gaming franchises ending up in Amazon’s hands. The same Amazon that’s bought everything from doorbell cameras, robot vacuums, James Bond, hipster grocery stores, online pharmacies, podcast networks, shoes, and a whole lot more.

What’s Next?

Every bubble bursts eventually. While I think both the AI and consolidation varieties will pop within the next couple of years, I’m worried they won’t be allowed to.

The US car industry should have collapsed in 2008, forcing a wave of innovation in the form of EVs and investments in public transpiration and bike infrastructure across the country. Instead, newly elected President Obama gave the car industry a massive bailout at the taxpayer’s expensive. Car companies were saved and consolidated their grip on the economy ever since, lobbying to prevent both EVs and public transportation from going anywhere in this country.

With the most corrupt President in history on the throne, there’s a very good chance that AI and these industry consolidations will not be allowed to fail, just like the auto industry nearly twenty years ago. Especially when he and his family are directly involved in those deals, as they are in both Paramount’s attempted takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery and the PIF’s purchase of Electronic Arts.

Trump has already moved mountains to restructure the US economy around AI. The military have heavily invested in AI companies, Trump has shielded AI-driven tech companies from his tariffs, appointed an “AI czar” to lead the regime’s AI policy, signed a deal with OpenAI to create AI programs for the State Department, invested in the Stargate Project, and took the unprecedented step of forcing Intel to sell a 10% stake to the US government.

All these moves, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said, have “saved the AI industry.”

Trump has already shown he’s willing to give billions in taxpayer money to foreign dictators who support him. Why wouldn’t he do the same for the industry that he’s so publicly thrown his own support behind?

Meanwhile, Paramount’s hostile takeover attempt of Warner Bros. Discovery will certainly succeed. What happens after that is the same thing that’s already been happening. More companies will buy yet more of their competitors. The only thing that will change are the targets, and the number of zeroes at the end. No longer will big companies focus on small ones. We’re now going to see more big swings – deals like the PIF buying EA and Paramount buying Warner Bros. Prices for consumers will go up, and products coming from these behemoths will be worse.

What happens when these bubbles burst will be catastrophic. But what happens when they’re artificially kept alive would be even worse. When looking at the big picture, Netflix’s complaints are so quaint. I guess they’ll just have to settle for buying Universal Studios for $50 billion, probably. Where’s my tiny violin?