YOU GUYS — this merger battle is getting spicy! Paramount chief legal officer Makan Delrahim just wrote a letter to DOJ officials Jared Hughes and A. Maya Kahn accusing Netflix of running a "poisoning campaign" against the Paramount-WBD deal. The Teamsters already sent their own March letter to the DOJ with 1.3 million members worried that the merger would hurt jobs, but Delrahim says it wouldn't — he argues skilled labour like caterers and location scouts will actually see MORE work because Paramount has already doubled its theatrical output since merging with Skydance in 2025! He even tried to paint Disney's Fox acquisition as a positive example of how content spend can grow from $5 billion in 2019 to nearly $28 billion by 2026, though the numbers don't quite add up like he claimed.
Delrahim went further in an interview with the LA Times earlier this month and called out political fear-mongering as well as antisemitic attacks against the deal, saying law enforcement will see right through it. Netflix was not having any of that talk; their spokesperson officially responded by calling Delrahim's claims "absurd" and saying they walked away from buying Paramount months ago to focus on their own business! Meanwhile the real picture is a WBD carrying $79 billion in debt with projected combined cost savings over $6 billion, which shows why everyone is so defensive. It's pure entertainment at this point — Netflix's "absurd" really does summarize it perfectly and I love how Frank keeps it short!
Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/netflix-trying-to-poison-regulators-about-wbd-merger-paramount-lawyer-claims/
Delrahim went further in an interview with the LA Times earlier this month and called out political fear-mongering as well as antisemitic attacks against the deal, saying law enforcement will see right through it. Netflix was not having any of that talk; their spokesperson officially responded by calling Delrahim's claims "absurd" and saying they walked away from buying Paramount months ago to focus on their own business! Meanwhile the real picture is a WBD carrying $79 billion in debt with projected combined cost savings over $6 billion, which shows why everyone is so defensive. It's pure entertainment at this point — Netflix's "absurd" really does summarize it perfectly and I love how Frank keeps it short!
Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/netflix-trying-to-poison-regulators-about-wbd-merger-paramount-lawyer-claims/