Overview

In September 2025, David Ellison - the 42-year-old son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison - drove to the Beverly Hills estate of Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav and offered to buy his company for $19 a share. Zaslav said no. Three months earlier, Ellison had torpedoed a billion-dollar licensing deal over South Park - reneging on a handshake agreement that Hollywood considered sacred. It was a slight Zaslav would never forgive. And it would shape the most consequential media transaction in American history. What followed was a five-month bidding war between Netflix and Paramount for control of Warner Bros., HBO, CNN, and a century of American storytelling. Ted Sarandos, the Netflix co-CEO who'd risen from a Phoenix video store to the top of the entertainment industry, squared off against Ellison, a billionaire heir backed by his father's quarter-trillion-dollar fortune and a direct line to the White House. Nine bids. Three rejections. A hostile takeover. A misspelled text message that became the defining artifact of the negotiation. A president who purchased bonds in both companies while publicly declaring his intention to influence the outcome. And a 90-minute window inside the White House where Sarandos received the news that changed everything - and walked away from an $83 billion deal. BOUGHT is the definitive account of the 2025-2026 battle for Warner Bros. Discovery - a story about dealmaking and betrayal, about political power weaponized against private markets, and about what happens when the question of who controls the American narrative is decided not by competition, but by accommodation. Drawing on SEC filings, corporate disclosures, and contemporaneous reporting, Randy Chia reconstructs the deal from the inside: the private dinners, the rejected offers, the moment a cartoon about foul-mouthed children in Colorado altered the future of CNN. For readers of Too Big to Fail, Bad Blood, and Going Infinite - a gripping narrative about the intersection of wealth, politics, and the stories we're allowed to see.

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