On the other hand, you had Paramount, owned by the spray-tan cured tech billionaire jerky Larry Ellison, though everyone is supposed to pretend that Ellison's do-nothing/know-nothing/amount-to-nothing son Billy (or whatever who cares) Ellison is running the show.

Ellison's plan was to buy Warners and fold it into the oligarchic media capture project that's seen Ellison replace the head of CBS with the tedious mediocrity Bari Weiss:

wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/a…

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The Century-Long Capture of U.S. Media | On the Media | WNYC Studios

As media empires, from The Washington Post to CBS News, continue to be dealt significant blows, uncertainties abound about the remaining strength of a once robust American press lands...

^{WNYC Studios}

This is a multi-pronged media takeover that includes Jeff Bezos neutering the *Washington Post*, Elon Musk turning Twitter into a Nazi bar, and Trump stealing Tiktok and giving it to Larry Ellison. If Ellison gains control over Warners, you can add CNN to the nonsense factory.

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But for a while there, it looked like the Ellisons would lose the bidding. Little Timmy (or whatever who cares) Ellison only has whatever money his dad parks in his bank account for tax purposes, and Larry Ellison is so mired in debt that one margin call could cost him his company, his fighter jet, and his Hawaiian version of Little St James Island.

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Warners' board may not give a shit about making good media or telling the truth or staving off fascism, but they *do* want to get paid, and Netflix has money in the bank, whereas Ellison only has the bank's money (for now).

But last week, the dam broke: Warners' board indicated they'd take Paramount's offer, and Netflix withdrew their offer, and so that's that, right?

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It's not like Trump's FTC is going to actually block this radioactively illegal merger, despite the catastrophic corporate consolidation that would result, with terrible consequences for workers, audiences, theaters, cable operators and the entire supply chain.

Not so fast! The Clayton Act - which bars this kind of merger - is designed to be enforced by the feds, state governments, and private parties.

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That means that California AG Rob Bonta can step in to block this merger, which he's getting ready to do:

prospect.org/2026/02/27/states…

As David Dayen writes in *The American Prospect*, state AGs block mergers all the time, even when the feds decline to step in - just a couple years ago, Washington state killed the Kroger/Albertsons merger.

The fact that antitrust laws can be enforced at the state level is a genius piece of policy design.

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States Can Block the Paramount-Warner Deal

This deal presages the death of Hollywood as a cultural and social force, another ruined industry at the mercy of monopolists and financiers.

^{David Dayen (The American Prospect)}

As the old joke goes, "AG" stands for "aspiring governor," and the fact that state AGs can step in to rescue their voters from do-nothing political hacks in Washington is *catnip* for our nation's attorneys general.

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Bonta is definitely feeling his oats: he's also going after Amazon for price-fixing, picking up a cause that Trump dropped after Jeff Bezos ordered the *Washington Post* to cancel its endorsement of Kamala Harris, paid a million bucks to sit on the inaugural dais, millions more to fund the White House Epstein Memorial Ballroom and $40m more to make an unwatchable turkey of a movie about Melania Trump.

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Can you imagine how stupid Bezos is going to feel when all of his bribes to Trump cash out to nothing after Rob Bonta publishes Amazon's damning internal memos and then fines the company a *gazillion* dollars?

It's a testament to the power designing laws so they can be enforced by multiple parties. And as cool as it is to have a law that state AGs can enforce, it's *way cooler* to have a law that can be enforced by members of the public.

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This is called a "private right of action" - the thing that lets impact litigation shops like Planned Parenthood, EFF, and the ACLU sue over violations of the public's rights. The business lobby *hates* the private right of action, because they think (correctly) that they can buy off enough regulators and enforcers to let them get away with murder (often literally), but they know they can't buy off every impact litigation shop and every member of the no-win/no-fee bar.

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For decades, corporate America has tried to abolish the public's right to sue companies under any circumstances. That's why so many terms of service now feature "binding arbitration waivers" that deny you access to the courts, no matter how badly you are injured:

pluralistic.net/2025/10/27/shi…

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