Paramount Falsely Threatens To Leave California After State Challenges Merger
from the taking-my-ball-and-going-home dept
Paramount is now threatening California regulators that they’ll be taking their ball and going home (to Texas? Israel?) after California and 11 other states filed an antitrust lawsuit against the company’s unpopular $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers.
Paramount leaked word of the nonexistent move to Semafor, which dutifully parroted the empty threat:
“Ellison’s confidantes have pushed him to consider moving its corporate headquarters and reallocating much of its $30 billion in planned spending outside the state if California Attorney General Rob Bonta were to sue to stop the merger, according to people familiar with the discussions.”
Much like those NYC billionaires who threatened to leave the city if Mamdani won, then didn’t. Or those Silicon Valley billionaires who threatened to leave California over (insert minor inconvenience or regulatory accountability effort) and head to Texas, then didn’t.
Paramount officials have been telling California that the merger will create vast untold new creative Utopias should it be approved, but few reasonable people believe them. In part because these mergers (especially involving Warner Brothers) never go well for anybody other than they highest echelons of the extraction class. And in part because of the lack of competence everyone is seeing from the likes of Bari Weiss at CBS.
As I’ve discussed at length, the $111 billion merger is going to be an ugly parade of debt, layoffs, higher consumer prices, foreign influence peddling, right wing agitprop, Trump appeasement, product quality declines, negative market health impacts, and overall chaos.
That’s assuming it gets approved. And while the Trump DOJ has unsurprisingly rubber-stamped the media domination dreams of close Trump ally Larry Ellison, a dozen states filed lawsuit last Monday, stating that further media consolidation at this scale would harm competition and violate Section 7 of the Clayton Act.
Oregon’s AG office recently stated Paramount refused to comply with requests for documents related to the merger. Paramount seems particularly cagey about requests for documents about how the company has specifically interacted with the Trump administration to grease the rails for quick and easy merger approval despite ample, obvious problems.
Much like when Paramount claimed opposition to their merger was “antisemitic,” you can sense a certain desperation among execs worried about these potential state antitrust challenges.
Even if the state opposition fails to block the deal outright, the lawsuits could introduce new delays that could be problematic for the debt-riddled transaction and Ellison, who is extremely far out over his skis on AI ahead of a potential bubble burst. Approval or not, history suggests it’s very likely that this all ends with a lot of sad whimpering — one way or another.
Filed Under: antitrust, california, consolidation, hollywood, layoffs, mergers, oregon
Companies: paramount, warner bros.
Comments on “Paramount Falsely Threatens To Leave California After State Challenges Merger”
Oh, gonna crawl off to Texas to die? Fine. Have a nice day.
Maybe they should move their headquarters to DC to be close to Trump. He can do some merging with Ellison. Trumpmount Productions…
Should just do us all a favor and move to russia.
I think one of the waves of threats to leave California is over the proposed billionaire wealth tax and I think I read a couple actually left.
It doesn’t matter overall of course.
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Weird!
I thought I read you didn’t know what you were talking about…..
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Everyone’s leaving CA for the simple reason that CA is hellhole, mostly because it is a quintessential blue state.
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Yeah, that must be why it’s the second most popular state for people to move to…
https://www.newsweek.com/california-sees-surge-people-moving-state-1986685
Oh wait…
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Only if you hate the sight of marginalized people being allowed to exist out in the open without needing to justify their existence to some violent fascist fuck every second of every day.
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As a European I’m inclined to agree, but California is still less of a hellhole than the red states.
Re: anonymous lying idiot
no one is leaving california or new york you lying halfwit…
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“Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.”
Sure, why work in a state
Sure, why work in a state that makes GDP instead of takes from maker states…
‘Let us do a thing that will cause immediate mass layoffs across the smoking remnants of two major companies, or we’ll move out of the state and cause fewer layoffs from one company over a longer period of time. We’ll absolutely relocate to places where very few of our bigger names will actually want to live and work and where we won’t be a stone’s throw away from the beating heart of the industry!’
I say go...
Whatever state they end of in is going to need the tax dollars after federal aid cuts. So go already… As long as that state has the infrastructure you need, you’re good.
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Why would a state get tax dollars from Paramount? They’re a leader in “Hollywood accounting” (a court praised their actions as “unconscionable” in 1990), so they’re never gonna show any significant profit. Plus, film companies are always pitting locations against each other and filming in whichever one will give them the best financial incentives. British Columbia, for example, increased its film/TV tax credit from 28% to 36% in 2024 because “business” was slowing down.
'If you try to force me to pay taxes I'll leave and you'll get no taxes from me!'
It always amuses me to see companies and/or rich people threaten to leave like this because scratch the surface and what they’re basically saying is that if the state tries to force them to follow the same laws and/or rules as everyone else they’ll take their ball and go home, hoping desperately that you ignore that maybe there’s a reason they set up shop in that state/city to begin with.
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Woah, hold on, California’s certainly not proposing that. In fact, as of July 2025, they expanded their film tax “credit”—and also made it refundable, meaning companies who don’t pay taxes no longer lose out; the state straight-up sends them money now.
Whereas people in most other businesses actually have to pay taxes (weird!). The film industry really would leave if they were treated equally.