# Warner Bros. Discovery > [!important] Update 2026-10-06 > The acquisition by Paramount Skydance **closed on October 6, 2026** after a September 21 settlement with twelve state attorneys general. The combined company is named **Skydance** (NYSE: SKYD), and [[David Zaslav]] left at closing. See [[Paramount Skydance - Warner Bros. Discovery Deal]] (Forbes; CBS News). The company that owns [[CNN]], HBO and Max, Warner Bros. Pictures, DC Studios and the Discovery cable networks — and, for the vault, the clearest case of a newsroom whose fate is set by its parent's balance sheet. It was formed on **April 8, 2022** when [[AT&T]] spun off [[WarnerMedia]] (its unhappy 2018 purchase of Time Warner) and merged it with Discovery under Discovery's CEO [[David Zaslav]] ([[WarnerMedia - Discovery Merger]]). The new company began life with about **$43 billion of debt**, and everything that followed is downstream of that number. ## The Zaslav years Zaslav's mandate was to service the debt: write-downs, cancelled films, merged streaming services, and at CNN an attempt to reposition the network toward the political center under [[Chris Licht]] (2022–23), which collapsed in a year. Debt reduction by cutting is slow when the assets are declining cable networks, so in June 2025 the company announced it would split in two — "Warner Bros." (studios and streaming) and "Discovery Global" (the cable networks, CNN included), which would have made cable news a stand-alone, low-growth, debt-loaded company on its own. ## The sale The split never happened, because the pieces were worth more to buyers than the whole was to shareholders. In December 2025 Netflix agreed to buy the company; [[Skydance-Paramount]] — [[David Ellison]], with [[Larry Ellison]]'s money — went hostile, and on **February 27, 2026** WBD accepted Paramount's **$31 a share, ~$111 billion** offer. Netflix withdrew the day before. The [[Department of Justice]] cleared the deal without conditions on June 12, 2026, four months after the Antitrust Division's chief had been pushed out and with its lobbyist channel fully operative (see [[Antitrust Division]]). Twelve state attorneys general and the Writers Guild then sued under Section 7 of the [[Clayton Antitrust Act]] and won a restraining order; Paramount has agreed not to close before the states' trial, set for **March 2, 2027**, and a ticking fee of roughly $7 million a day starts October 1, 2026. Larry Ellison's personal guarantee — $40.4 billion — is sized against an Oracle share price that has fallen by a third this year. [[Paramount Skydance - Warner Bros. Discovery Deal]] tracks the status; the [[CNN and Warner Bros. Discovery Timeline]] has the chronology. ## Why it matters here If the deal closes, [[CBS News]] and [[CNN]] — two of the three legacy U.S. news operations — will belong to the same owner, one who settled a presidential lawsuit, bought [[The Free Press]] to run CBS News, and needed the [[FCC]] and DOJ of the administration his network covers. The [[Media Capture]] page describes the four mechanisms; WBD is where three of them (ownership, regulatory leverage, debt) converge on a single newsroom. The counter-reading is also on the record: CNN under Zaslav was already being managed as a distressed asset, and the question the sale poses is whether a captured owner is worse for a newsroom than a bankrupt one. ## See Also - [[CNN]] · [[CNN and Warner Bros. Discovery Timeline]] · [[David Zaslav]] · [[Chris Licht]] - [[AT&T]] · [[WarnerMedia]] · [[WarnerMedia - Discovery Merger]] · [[Time Warner]] - [[Paramount Skydance - Warner Bros. Discovery Deal]] · [[Skydance-Paramount]] · [[David Ellison]] · [[Larry Ellison]] · [[Netflix Timeline]] · [[Paramount Timeline]] - [[Media Capture]] · [[Media Consolidation]] · [[Antitrust Division]] · [[Brendan Carr]] · [[Tiber Creek Group]] - [[Media Company Timelines Hub]]