- David Zaslav wanted a new president who was open to M&A.
- Now he has one. But regulation wasn’t the only thing holding back Big Media deals.
- And we don’t know if Trump will take issue with specific deals — as he did when AT&T wanted to buy Time Warner.
David Zaslav wanted a new president who would make it easier for his company to buy other companies — or sell itself.
Now he has his wish.
The second version of the Trump administration could be a boon for media companies facing a “generational divide,” the CEO of Warner Bros. said. Discovery on his company’s earnings call Thursday morning.
“We have a new administration coming in and it’s too early to tell,” he said. “But it could provide a pace of change and an opportunity for consolidation that could be quite different, that would provide a real positive and accelerated impact on this industry that is needed.”
That happens to be what Zaslav said he was looking for in July when he told reporters: “We just need an opportunity for deregulation so companies can consolidate and do what it takes to be even better .”
As I noted at the time, consolidation has been a watchword for Zaslav — and for John Malone, a billionaire investor who sits on WBD’s board — for years. The original argument was that everyone who isn’t Netflix should bundle their streamers; now, there’s also the idea that the big media companies might do well to combine their struggling TV networks.
But the consensus in the media industry — as well as in other industries, such as technology — was that Joe Biden’s antitrust policies and personnel made him an upstart.
Now Biden is leaving. And key appointments like Lina Khan, head of the Federal Trade Commission, and Jonathan Kanter, who heads the antitrust division at the Justice Department, are also likely on the way out. So Zaslav, like many other executives and observers, thinks M&A is back.
But even if the new Trump administration is more open to big deals, that doesn’t make them a foregone conclusion.
For example: Earlier this year, when Zaslav was talking to Paramount about a merger, advisers to Paramount owner Shari Redstone worried that a Paramount/WBD deal “would pose increased regulatory risk,” a filing said last of Paramount’s investors. But that discussion became a problem as Zaslav never made an offer, in part because he didn’t want to pay Paramount cash.
There’s also the knotty — and, at the moment, unknown — issue that’s specific to Donald Trump: What kinds of companies and deals does he like and dislike?
In his first administration, for example, Trump’s Justice Department sued to stop AT&T from buying the company then called Time Warner. Many industry watchers, including many AT&T and Time Warner executives, thought the lawsuit was intended to punish Time Warner’s CNN, which Trump has often railed against. (Trump’s top antitrust lawyer insisted it wasn’t.)
That deal eventually fell through and then AT&T eventually decided it didn’t want to own a media company after all and ended up selling it to Zaslav. So would CNN’s presence create an obstacle if he wanted to do a deal now?
It is worth noting that in his first term, Trump was an enthusiastic supporter of his ally Rupert Murdoch’s deal to sell a large part of his business to Disney, of which Trump’s spokesman said that ” it could be a great thing for jobs.” (The transaction, like many mergers, was followed by multiple layoffs.)
And now CNN is owned by a company backed by Malone, another conservative media owner and a Trump supporter. Would that change Trump’s calculus? We can find out.