The Warner Bros. Discovery board may have enriched its shareholders Thursday when it chose Paramount Skydance‘s acquisition offer over Netflix‘s, but it also terrified a lot of its employees.
While some of those people own WBD shares and may prefer the financials of Paramount’s $31-per-share bid to Netflix’s $27.75-per-share offer, CNBC spoke to 10 WBD employees in a variety of different roles at the company. All 10, who asked not to be named for fear of potential backlash, expressed concerns about potential job losses and questions of who would ultimately run their divisions if Paramount and WBD are eventually merged.
“It’s fair to say people are deflated by the news,” said one long-term WBD executive.
Nonetheless, a WBD-Paramount merger “is not a done deal,” as California Attorney General Rob Bonta said yesterday.
The transaction must gain regulatory approval both in the U.S. and in Europe. WBD CEO David Zaslav acknowledged at an all-hands meeting Friday that the deal may still be blocked and expressed sympathy for those experiencing a sense of whiplash going from Netflix to Paramount, according to people familiar with the matter.
“The deal may not close. If it doesn’t close, we get $7 billion, and we get back to work,” Zaslav said, according to leaked audio provided to Business Insider.
Still, several WBD employees told CNBC they wished Netflix had acquired WBD, citing several factors.
While Paramount and WBD both have core competencies in news, sports, theatrical film and streaming TV, Netflix has far less overlap. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos repeatedly said he planned to leave the WBD business alone, keeping its theatrical business separate from Netflix while also keeping HBO Max as a separate, independent streaming service for the foreseeable future.
Netflix also wasn’t acquiring WBD’s linear cable business with its bid. Employees at CNN, TNT Sports and the old Discovery networks would have remained in their jobs to forge a path as a standalone publicly traded company.
Now, WBD employees are staring at potentially massive job cuts. Paramount executives have previously stated they plan to cut $6 billion by eliminating “duplicative operations” on “back office, finance, corporate, legal, technology, infrastructure, et cetera,” according to Chief Strategy Officer Andy Gordon. Both WBD and Paramount have already gone through thousands of job cuts in recent years.
There are also questions about culture and leadership. While Mark Thompson currently runs CNN, Bari Weiss is the editor-in-chief at CBS News and could plausibly have CNN added to her purview.
The Wall Street Journal reported in December that Paramount CEO David Ellison promised President Donald Trump he’d make sweeping changes at CNN if he gained control of the network. Three CNN employees who spoke with CNBC said there’s rampant fear among their colleagues about Weiss making dramatic changes to the cable network’s anchors and tone.
“Despite all the speculation you’ve read during this process, I’d suggest that you don’t jump to conclusions about the future until we know more,” Thompson wrote in a memo to employees Thursday.
CNN media reporter Brian Stelter noted CNN “is a highly profitable business, and it would be foolish for any owner to put that at risk.”
On the entertainment side, WBD employees fear there may be too many proverbial cooks in the kitchen, which could bog down creativity and innovation for both film and TV.
One WBD executive noted that Paramount’s President Jeff Shell, Chair of Direct to Consumer Cindy Holland and Chair of TV George Cheeks are all used to being senior leaders in their organizations. Shell was CEO of NBCUniversal. Cheeks was co-CEO of Paramount before it merged with Skydance. Holland was a top executive at Netflix, where she worked for 18 years.
How that mix meshes with WBD’s entertainment leadership group is an open question and could lead to culture clashes.
TNT Sports is run by Luis Silberwasser and has largely steered WBD toward younger audiences with its programming decisions and investments, including Bleacher Report and House of Highlights. CBS Sports, meanwhile, is driven by the demographics of those who watch CBS and has historically catered to an older audience. This could lead to culture clash, or the divisions could mesh nicely as complementary assets.
While Silberwasser will have to work with CBS Sports President David Berson on employee duplications, like every other department, there’s some reason for optimism in the sports division, because WBD and CBS have worked together for many years producing March Madness, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. That’s given the units some degree of familiarity with each other.
WBD also lost NBA rights last season. Combining with CBS’ robust portfolio of sports rights, including the NFL and the Masters, makes WBD a major player again in sports, even if it’s as a subsidiary of CBS.
One other repeated concern among employees is the $64 billion in debt coming as part of the $111 billion enterprise value for the deal. Several employees said servicing large debt loads has hindered WBD in recent years, and they feared this could lead to more of the same. Two employees noted there’s comfort being a part of a giant company like Netflix, with a market capitalization of more than $400 billion. Paramount Skydance’s market valuation is just $15 billion.
