Media’s New Soap Opera: Netflix, Paramount, & Warner Bros. Discovery 12/17/25

0:00Bring in show music please. This is Squawk Pod, and I'm CNBC producer Cameron Costa. On today's episode, will they? Won't they? This could take a while. Warner Brothers' Discovery tells shareholders that Netflix's deal is better than Paramount's hostile bid. It's drama fit for a prestige streaming series. Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters sat down with CNBC's David Faber only on Squawk Box. He says they're the ones to win. Our deal structure is clean. It's certain. We're a scaled company with over a$400 billion market cap. We've got strong investment grade balance sheet. This deal offers flexibility for Warner Brothers to do what they're planning on doing.

0:44And media analyst Rich Greenfield weighs in on the script Paramount writes from here. My guess is Paramount doesn't have the money right now, and they are out searching for dollars because, as you see, they wouldn't have gone to the Middle East if they had the money. Then the biggest IPO of the year comes in 2025's 11th hour. Healthcare supplies distributor Medline has been around forever, in case you haven't heard of them. CEO Jim Boyle joins us on the day of its debut. We are the largest company you've never heard of, and we happen to be everywhere, which is a pretty interesting thing. Plus, the rest of today's news that got us squawking.

1:19It's Wednesday, December 17, 2025, and SquawkPod begins right now. Stand Becky by in 3, 2, 1. Cue it, please. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Squawk Box right here on CNBC. We're live from the Nasdaq market site in Times Square. I'm Becky Quick along with Andrew Ross Sorkin. Joe is out today. Medline raising close to$6.3 billion in the world's biggest IPO this year. In fact, it was the biggest U.S. IPO since Rivian's four years ago. The medical supply company is selling more than 215 million shares at$29 a piece. The initial plan was to sell about 180 million shares at somewhere between$26 and$30 each and raise up to$5.4 billion.

2:06Medline was founded in 1966 and it was bought by private equity firms including Blackstone and Carlyle back in 2021. We have a first on Squawk Box interview today with Medline's CEO. Meantime, we've got some news on the soap opera that is the takeover of Warner Brothers' discovery. Its board now planning to tell shareholders to reject a takeover offer from Paramount Skydance and stick with that Netflix deal. It's going to multiple reports, and that would leave Paramount to decide whether to increase its offer for Warner. Some believe a Paramount-Warner Brothers tie-up would be more likely to survive government review, since President Trump is close with billionaire Larry Ellison, the father of Paramount CEO David Ellison.

2:45unclear but on truth social yesterday president trump said for those people that think i'm close with the new owner of cbs please understand that 60 minutes has treated me far worse since the so-called takeover than they ever treated me before if they are friends i'd hate to see my enemies so we'll see which side ultimately uh this president were if he were to decide uh one one group is better than the other um at roughly the same time and this is interesting uh we also learned Jared Kushner's firm Affinity Partners has dropped out of the Paramount's bid, which he had sided with effectively. He was backing Paramount's bid originally for Warner Brothers Discovery.

3:23Kushner is president, of course, President Trump's son-in-law. So that at least takes that piece off the table. Potential conflict of interest for the president who has said that he's going to be involved in the decision-making process for which one gets to go through regulatory approval. There are some interesting questions that have been raised, though. Rich Greenfield brings up the idea again that because there's all this Middle East money that's involved with it, including one of the backers of Al Jazeera involved in it, it would be interesting to see how that would go over with CFIUS. Now, the Middle Eastern money would supposedly not have any say in what's going on with this.

4:05It'd be passive interest in it, not actively involved, but there are going to be potential regulatory questions that come with either one of these bids. It seems to me this is going to go on for many, many months. Because if you're paramount, there's no incentive to actually jump this bid at this point. You can run the proxy contest all the way through April. You could play this out. Segment tenders, there's shares. You could see where things stand. You could see where the regulatory environment lives. You could see what the president thinks of you or whomever on any given day. This could take a while.

4:40Rich Greenfield is going to be joining us, and he's got some other thoughts. He thinks Paramount should say forget it and go on to one of two other things. Either go on and try and make some deal with Comcast, with NBCUniversal, or just take all of that money and spend pretty aggressively on investing in their own streaming service in terms of marketing and getting more content that they put into themselves. But we'll talk to him about all of those things. And then the question on that front is, could they get the money from the Middle East and all of these other people to give them the same kind of money, or are we talking about a different kind, you know, a lot less?

5:15CNBC confirming that President Trump plans to interview Fed Governor Christopher Waller today as the president continues his search for his preferred candidate to lead the Fed after Chairman Jay Powell. On prediction market calci, bettors currently see about a 20 percent chance that Trump will nominate Waller to head the Fed. That is up significantly from yesterday. Kevin Hassett has been seen as the frontrunner for weeks at this point. He now on Cal State has about 55 percent in terms of that prediction market. The House said to vote on legislation later today to reduce the cost of health care, but it won't include extending Affordable Care Act insurance premium tax credits.

5:53Those expire at the end of the year. House Speaker Mike Johnson refusing to give a vote to a proposal that was backed by some centrist Republicans to extend those credits in a limited fashion. Now, it's still possible some House GOP members could join with Democrats to force a vote on that issue. But even if that passed, you'd be unlikely to face, or I should say, very likely to face an uphill battle in the Senate. President Trump planning to deliver a live address to the nation from the White House tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern time. Press Secretary Caroline Levitt said that the president will tout the administration's accomplishments from his first 11 months in office, as well as his plans to, in their words, continue delivering for the American people over the next three years.

6:37Cheese will be next. Coming up on Squawk Pod, Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters sits down with CNBC's David Faber. We will bring you that full interview. Has the streaming giant won in its bid for Warner Brothers Discovery? We're confident regulators will ultimately see this as pro-consumer, pro-creator, pro-worker, pro-growth, pro-innovation and pro-competition. Will the other suitor, Paramount, backed by the wealthy Ellison family, go away without the fight? One of Wall Street's top media analysts, Rich Greenfield, says that offer may have been a house of cards. Joke? Fully intended. It wasn't even clear that there was any money behind all of this in terms of like, who was actually funding it.

7:20We've been asking this question now for months. Is Larry Ellison writing a$75 billion check? And I think, Andrew, the clear answer is no.

7:32You're listening to Squawk Pod. And we're going to catch you up very quickly on the media deal that we mentioned earlier, the one that's been brewing for months. Netflix's deal to buy the streaming and film assets of Warner Brothers Discovery, a.k.a. Warner Bros., HBO, and HBO Max. Warner Brothers Discovery was shopping around for a buyer of those assets for months. Comcast was on the table at one point, and so was, drumroll please, Paramount Skydance. Earlier this month, Netflix announced that it put forth the winning bid, prompting questions about whether Paramount would launch a hostile bid, which, as of last week, as we all know, it did.

8:11That same day, Paramount CEO David Ellison spoke directly to our own David Faber at CNBC, explaining his communication with Warner Brothers Discovery CEO David Zaslav. We're sitting on Wall Street where cash is still king. We're offering shareholders$17.6 billion more cash than the deal they currently have signed up with Netflix. And we believe when they see what is currently in our offer that that's what they'll vote for. The last communication that I had with David Zaslav is I made it incredibly clear in text message, This is all going to be public for everybody to see that we addressed all of the issues that they asked for and very specifically that our offer was not best and final.

8:52And so when we literally delivered a$30 per share all cash offer, we never heard back. Today, over a week later, we learned that Warner Brothers Discovery Board unanimously recommended shareholders reject that hostile bid and stick with Netflix. You heard that tidbit from Andrew and Becky a little bit earlier. But more deals mean more leverage. Here's Becky. I reached out to Mario Gabelli, who is a shareholder in Warner Brothers Discovery, to get his take on this. About a week ago, he was saying he was leaning towards the Paramount Skydance offer. He had listened to Paramount Skydance at a UBS conference and basically said it sounded like it was more money.

9:29It sounded like it was cash up front. Well, I just called him to see what he thought about Warner Brothers' latest. Said he hasn't watched, read through the filing, isn't familiar with the details on some of those things. He said at this point he's still waiting to see what happens, but he said basically the most important part is to keep it in play, meaning they want to see more back and forth from Netflix. I think he has said he would like to see Paramount Skydance raise their offer as well. But he's looking at all parts of this. He looks at the idea would be to give Netflix a higher cash part of that offer.

9:59That's what he'd like to maybe see, eliminate the collar on the stock that exists with that. But from the shareholder's perspective, at least Mario Gabelli, whose firm owns about 5.7 million shares of Warner Brothers, which was valued at about$160 million, he'd basically like just to see more from all sides on this. And that's how somebody like Mario is kind of playing this. They want to keep it in play. They want to see more, see what's to come on these things. The only thing I was going to mention that to me is so interesting about this is that ultimately this thing will get decided by shareholders simply probably on just dollars and cents.

10:34And that's kind of what Mario's take on all of this is. We'll see. He's not making any comment about where he gets to go from. He just wants the most money. Show me the money. But it's not a story about who's the best steward for the asset or anything else like that. Not for somebody like Mario. Not for somebody like Mario. Mario also owns shares in both Netflix and Paramount Skydance. So an interesting play to see some of the media investors who are involved with this, which is what you've said, too, is they think there's more coming. And that's what they all think there's more coming. But it's interesting because I wonder whether he would ever say, given that he owns these other assets, that they're paying too much.

11:07And what, again, the other piece you don't know is, does he own a little bit of Paramount and a little bit of Netflix and a lot of Warner Brothers Discovery? Because he's making, you know, so. About 5.7 million shares of Warner Brothers Discovery. I don't know what he owns on both Netflix and Paramount. But if he owned a lot of Netflix, for example, and he didn't own these, you know, it might be a different situation. So you've got to always figure out what the true incentives are. CNBC's David Faber secured another interview with a key player the morning of all of this news. Netflix's co-CEO, Greg Peters.

11:41Very happy to have Greg Peters, the co-CEO of Netflix, join us now on a morning in which, of course, their deal to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery has been reaffirmed essentially by the Warner Board. You heard from Sam DiPiazza just a little while ago right here. Great to have you with us this morning. Thank you. Good to be here. I'd love to start with antitrust because it has been one of the key risks seen for both your deal and potentially as well for the Paramount deal. in its communications this morning. The Warner Brothers board says, despite media statements to the contrary, they don't think there's a material difference in regulatory risk between the two deals.

12:21How do you see it for Netflix as the path to getting approval here, given so many people seem to have objections to putting together the number one and number three streamer in both Netflix and HBO? Yeah, we believe the regulatory process will ultimately conclude based on the facts. And we feel those facts really support the approval of the deal. We're confident regulators will ultimately see this as pro-consumer, pro-creator, pro-worker, pro-growth, pro-innovation, and pro-competition. You came up with a few examples of how you might define the market. We look at the market definition in a couple of different ways.

12:58A key one for our side is just who's winning TV view share. And I think if you look at that, we're way low in the rankings. We're sixth behind Google and YouTube, behind Disney, behind Comcast, NBCU, Fox, Paramount. Even when we put HBO Max and HBO on top of the Netflix viewing, that still puts us behind YouTube and Disney. So we believe there's a really good story as to why this is a deal that's good for consumers at the end of the day, why it doesn't have creators in any way. And we're already engaged with competition authorities, including DOJ and EU commission to explain that to them. You are.

13:33So you've already begun that engagement. Can you describe at all what you're seeing there and or what is giving you perhaps confidence that you can, in fact, meet any objections they may have? Well, I think it's just, you know, helping them with the facts essentially around what's happening. And I think, you know, there's we mentioned the view share on TV. Another way to look at this is I've heard people talk about combining the number of subscribers. I think it's important to understand that the two services are highly complementary. More than 75 % of HBO Max members also subscribe to Netflix.

14:05So this creates actually an opportunity to offer consumers a more tailored, better optimized subscription plan, more value. We also think, when you think about the number of buyers that are out there on the creator side, we've got new buyers coming in, like Amazon, Apple, we've got the fast services, like Tubi. So there's a tremendous number of ways to get your project made and get it out to an audience. Yeah. And to those who would say, well, really, they're just buying HBO, obviously, as part of this overall deal, but HBO in particular, to kill it. You talk about the overlap to put a key competitor out of business.

14:40How do you or to really pull it aside and sort of undermine it? How do you respond to that criticism? Well, I think that would be a very bad idea because, I mean, we think there's a tremendous value in HBO and it's an amazing brand. It says Prestige TV. We're excited to double down on that promise. I think actually the HBO brand and service gives us another tool for how we think about assembling our plans. How do we deliver different offerings to our members? We've just gone through a similar exercise with our ad plans where we had to think about how do you compose the right set of offerings to satisfy different consumers while maximizing the value for the business.

15:15That sort of key thesis with regard to the HBO brand and service is a key important part of value for us. So we want to see HBO thrive rather than the opposite. Yeah. To come back to antitrust for a moment, the president's going to play an important role here. Is there any indication you've gotten from the administration in terms of how they're going to view this transaction? I think just stepping back, the president and this administration, they care about American industry. They care about the success of American companies. I think we have a great story that we've created over 140 ,000 jobs in just the last four years in the United States.

15:52We think about production, post-production, construction. We support small businesses and local communities. So I really think this deal is a win for the entire industry. It brings an important, iconic studio into a sustainable model that means more investment. That means more opportunities, more American jobs, more union jobs, more production staying in the United States. EU is going to play an important role. You raised it as well. What are your expectations there? We oftentimes can just get, you know, overly focused on the U.S. regulatory process. Yeah, and as I mentioned, we're already engaged with the EU Commission as well.

16:27I think we have a similar story there where we can bring more opportunities for creators in the European Union to tell their stories in big ways and bring that to a bigger global audience. One of the things we love about this deal, the other big center of value for us, is there's an incredible library of content out there in the Warner Brothers catalog, and we can bring that to more people around the world and create value for consumers and for creators as a result. Becky's got a question. David, thanks. Greg, just spoke with one of your shareholders, Mario Gabelli, a little bit ago, and just asked him what he thought about all of this with the filing coming out today and seeing what's happening.

17:04And Mario's firm, Gabelli Funds, I think owns about 5.7 million shares of Warner Brothers Discovery. Going to be a big question on what shareholders decide to do with all of these issues. He said basically, most importantly, he would like to continue to see this whole deal in play. With looking at Netflix on this, he said he'd love to see a higher cash portion of that offer coming in cash from Netflix and maybe eliminate the collar on this. But ultimately, he said he's still deciding where he thinks this is going and would like to see this still in play. Is Netflix going to sweeten its offer? Well, I would say I don't want to speculate on what's going to happen from here.

17:43We are pretty happy that we've presented a pretty strong deal. And I think the Warner Brothers Discovery Board sent a pretty clear message that they believe that this is the best value. It's the most certain path forward. Our deal structure is clean. It's certain. We're a scaled company with over a 400 billion market cap. We've got strong investment grade balance sheet. This deal offers flexibility for Warner Brothers to do what they're planning on doing, which they think is best for their business, which is separate discovery global. So we're you know, we believe this is a great deal and, you know, we'd love to see this through.

18:15Greg, if I could step back for a minute and just sort of, you know, given I haven't had this chance to ask you this question or to Ted, why are you doing the deal? I mean, there had been many who were sort of questioning it throughout, saying they're not really serious here. My reporting indicated otherwise. But they worry about your multiple. They worry about what it says about how you view your own ability to grow and that your multiple, therefore, will take a hit longer term here as you integrate this. They worry about integration. You've never done a deal, let alone a deal of this size. Why is this worth undertaking all of this distraction and risk?

18:49Yeah, I think we're in the business of doing things that we've never done before and learning how to do them well. I mean, we didn't do ads before, we didn't do live before. I think those are been quite successful and additive to the business. We're going to make them even more successful. At the end of the day, we like our organic growth path. We're on a great trajectory to deliver double-digit growth still. We see that coming for many years. But we saw, as we got into looking at this opportunity, basically the opportunity to accelerate that. And we think about the catalog of titles. We think by bringing those to bigger distribution reach, by having a best-in-class product experience, we unlock more value for both consumers and for creators.

19:29We do that day in, day out. So this is just another opportunity to do that more. I mentioned the HBO brand. We think there's an opportunity to bring that into the mix, and that helps us elaborate our plan offering and optimize value, both again for consumers as well for the business. So we looked at this and we said, hey, you know, it's probably irresponsible for us not to actually bid on this and bid on it in a disciplined way. And if we can bring it in, then we'll figure out how to do the integration, just like we figure out how to do a bunch of stuff that we've never done before. Yeah. And you're not concerned ultimately.

19:58I mean, your multiple to earnings has been the envy of the media business for years. Are you concerned at all that you put that in danger? I think, you know, we'll prove it just like we proved it every, you know, previous quarter, you know, that we can actually make value out of this. And we'll show our shareholders how we're doing that. And I think the results will speak for themselves.

20:19When it comes to whether you would raise, Becky asked the question, but I'm curious. Obviously, you don't need to now. You've got a deal. It's been reaffirmed. But there certainly is a possibility that Paramount will come back and it is possible they will meet many of the objections raised by the board. If that does happen, will you guys fight to keep this asset? Let's see what happens. I would also say that we have shown again and again and again through multiple deals. You think about licensing deals when we bid for rights for live events, et cetera. We do the work to establish what's the value to the business.

20:55We bid aggressively up until that point. But also, we are dispassionate when it comes to the fact that if somebody is willing to bid more, then we say, okay, Godspeed, and we'll exercise the same discipline here. Yeah. When it comes to sort of the Hollywood community, I had Bob Iger on with me last week as well, sort of talking broadly in terms of would it be healthy for Netflix to own Warner Brothers? What will the impact be on the creative community, on the ecosystem of television and films, particularly motion pictures? What do you say to those who are very concerned ultimately that you're still going to follow the Netflix model?

21:30You're not going to really release as many movies. And ultimately, this could be damaging to that entire community, some of whom have stood up already and indicated their concern about the deal itself. Yep. We will maintain Warner Brothers operations. That means we're 100 percent committed to releasing Warner Brothers films in theaters with industry standard windows. And I think if you step back, you know, Warner has three core businesses that Netflix doesn't have. It's got a successful theatrical film division. It's got a world class television studio. It's got HBO. We mentioned that before. We see these as assets, not as liabilities.

22:05We want to preserve their value. We want to preserve their contributions. We're going to operate them as such. We've debated building these businesses multiple times in the past, and we thought they were good businesses. It's just that we had other things to focus on. But now, as part of this transaction, we bring mature, world-class versions of these businesses in-house, and we're looking forward to adding that expertise. So I'd say this is complimentary. We want to keep that value and we're going to keep those operations essentially had they've been running before. Yeah. There had been some talk, let's call it, that you and Sarandos had a different view of this and that you were not nearly as enthusiastic about the transaction.

22:46Is that true? No, it's actually it's been remarkable because I think that we assumed we might come in with different perspectives on it as well. But we did the work, and really the work speaks for itself, which is you get in and you actually build the models. You understand how would these titles contribute. And again, remember, this is an exercise we do day in and day out where we're looking at various different licensing opportunities, understanding how will titles perform on our service. So we have a very elaborate, deep understanding of how that works. And when you've got that model, then you do the hard work and you beat it up and you challenge yourself on all the assumptions.

23:22But when you conclude at the end of the day that there is a tremendous amount of value creation in this kind of deal for our members, the people that we serve, for the creative community as well, we look at it and we say, you know, we're excited both to move forward. Yeah. And finally, Greg, back to the sort of antitrust, the gamut of things you run. When do you see the deal closing? What are your expectations in terms of when you will actually own this asset? We've been looking at this as a 12th to 18th month process. Obviously, you know, there's different regulatory paths across different jurisdictions.