Paramount Skydance running out of patience for WBDs refusals of sweetened takeover offer

Inside the Paramount Skydance camp, there’s a running joke about what new “excuse” Warner Bros.Discovery will come up with next to reject PSKY’s latest “sweetened” takeover offer for the media conglomerate.“This time, I bet they say they don’t like the type of paper we use,” quipped one person on the Paramount team.There’s also mounting anger at WBD CEO David Zaslav and his board.

It was Zas — as the mercurial mogul is known in media circles — who upended Paramount Skydance’s attempt last September to buy the company for $19 a share by creating a bidding war that is now pushing the sale price into the stratosphere.Streaming giant Netflix emerged as the winner, at least for now.But Hollywood producer David Ellison — the CEO of Paramount Skydance who is partnering with RedBird Capital’s Gerry Cardinale and who is financially backed by dad Larry Ellison’s $240 billion fortune — won’t give up the ghost.They’ve launched a hostile bid for the company with ever-sweetened offers that keep getting spurned.Now, as I was first to report, they’re thinking about litigation — their so-called DEFCON 1 strategy — because they think the process was rigged from the start to give Netflix the upper hand.They haven’t ruled out increasing their offer, at least as this report goes to press, but the mood internally is that they need to play the long game, try to convince investors their deal is superior to Netflix’s, and maybe even sue Zas & Co.

for rigging the bidding process and favoring a less shareholder-friendly combo.Zas and his people deny the rigging charge, and they’ve provided disclosures explaining the bidding process including multiple meetings with the Ellisons.But the Paramount Skydance peeps point to the friendship of Zas and Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos hovering over the selection, which IMHO is the least compelling piece of the argument.

The C-suite of the media business was and is a boys club, and what I know about Za...