Discussion
For months, the hottest will they/won't they drama in Hollywood concerned the suitors for Warners, up for sale again after being bought, merged, looted and wrecked by the eminently guillotineable David Zaslav:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izC9o3LhnVk
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/28/golden-mean/#reality-based-community
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@pluralistic As you rightly observe, there are so many guillotineable plutes these days; our Mme Defarge will be prompting an AI rather than knitting.
I highly recommend this enjoyable short essay on our bumbling oligarchy.
From the start, it was clear that Warners would be sucked dry and discarded, but the Trump 2024 election turned the looting of Warners' corpse into a high-stakes political drama.
On the one hand, you had Netflix, who wanted to buy Warners and use them to make good movies, but also to kill off movie theaters forever by blocking theatrical distribution of Warners' products.
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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:
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/the-centurylong-capture-of-us-media
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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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