New Skydance Worth Less Than Half of Warner Brothers, Paramount Combined

amanaplanacanal

Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.

rekttrader

Let’s hope that continued data center debt sell pressure further squeezes Larry.

busterarm

Proof that Techdirt should stay in its lane. The media mergers happening now are a pure survival play. Margins are collapsing, ad rates are collapsing, audiences are fragmented. Every media company is trying to scale up to survive terrible market conditions. Reducing audience fragmentation and being able to negotiate better ad rates are the only way to do that. These companies were going to lose all of this money (and more) if they didn't merge. These layoffs are happening regardless. It's funny because in the tech industry with funding drying up the exact same thing is happening but editorial is so happy to dunk on people they hate that they're too dumb to see the obvious. M&A accelerates in a down market. QED.

JumpCrisscross

This is some crap reporting. The source for the headline, Variety , says pre-merger “Warner Bros Discovery had a market capitalization of $77.7 billion and Paramount was around $11 billion. Today, Skydance has a market cap of under $40 billion — less than half the predecessor companies’ combined value” [1]. Of course it does. It has a bunch of debt. The correct metric is enterprise value [2]. Skydance is currently about $36bn equity value, $75bn debt value with $8bn cash. $110 net debt, $118bn with cash. Not much of a haircut given rates went up in the interim. The real story is in the credit markets [3]. [1] https://variety.com/2026/film/news/skydance-market-cap-less-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_value [3] https://bondblox.com/news/paramounts-bonds-weaken-further