President Donald Trump said in a new interview on Wednesday did an about-face and said that he will not be involved in the fight between streaming giant Netflix and Paramount Skydance to buy some or all of Warner Bros. Discovery.
“I haven’t been involved,” Trump told “NBC Nightly News.”
“I’ve been called by both sides,” Trump said. “It’s the two sides, but I’ve decided I shouldn’t be involved. The Justice Department will handle it.”
Trump’s latest comment is a pivot from what he said in early December after Netflix’s proposed acquisition of WBD was made public.
Trump at that time said the deal “could be a problem” because of the size of the market share Netflix would end up with if the proposed purchase was approved by federal regulators.
The president, at the same time, had said he would be involved in the process of reviewing and potentially approving the deal, which, in addition to U.S. regulatory approval, faces a review by European regulators.
The billionaire Larry Ellison, whose son David Ellison is Paramount’s CEO, is close to Trump.
And Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos visited Trump in the Oval Office shortly before his company’s offer to WBD was recommended by WBD leadership.
Netflix proposes acquiring WBD in a deal worth $72 billion, which would not include the company’s cable networks, including CNN. The deal would give Netflix WBD’s film studio, in addition to HBO and the streaming service HBO Max.
Paramount, in response, launched a hostile takeover bid for all of WBD, with an enterprise value of more than $108 billion.
“There’s a theory that one of the companies is too big and it shouldn’t be allowed to do it, and the other company is saying something else,” Trump told NBC News on Wednesday.
“They’re beating the hell out of each other — and there’ll be a winner,” the president said.
Sarandos appeared Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee, where he reportedly said that his meeting with Trump “was not specifically to talk about the deal.”
“I have confidence in this case on the merits, and that it will be run by the Department of Justice,” Sarandos said, according to The New York Times.
Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, at the hearing said, “All told, one might say that Netflix seeks to become the one platform to rule them all, or at least to exercise a significant amount of market dominance,” according to the Times.
“The merger raises numerous antitrust concerns, in a nutshell, consolidating both production and distribution power,” Lee said.