The worst acquisition in history, again
profgmedia.com
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What is it that these CEOs think they are seeing, that everyone else is missing? I can believe they have inflated egos, but they’re not totally crazy, right? My impression is that Netflix is fairly sober and results oriented, so I’m confused by the whole thing.
Capital One to lay off more than 1,100 in latest cuts at Discover Financial HQ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270442 - March 2026
This appears to be Larry Ellison trying to manage succession for his kids. We'll probably see a second major acquisition like this for Megan (who tends to be more progressive leaning) [edit: I was right. Megan Ellison is making moves as well now [0]]
Larry would not be able to do something similar at Oracle today (definitely in the 2000s though), as by the 2010s operational control at Oracle increasingly shifted to operators like Catz, Hurd, and Kurian. It also would have led to bad blood à la the Murdochs.
One heir cultivating the right wing (David) and the other heir cultivating the progressive wing (Megan) buys a level of political impunity for the next generation that is hard to come by.
[0] - https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/megan-el...
> “We should bear in mind that, in general, it is the object of our newspapers rather to create a sensation — to make a point — than to further the cause of truth.”
Bezos bought the Post for clout. Ellison (and his investors) are buying Warner Brothers first and foremost to make money.
Sure. The same goes for most bunker-buster LBOs. Doesn’t mean the sponsors are doing it with the expectation of losing money.
To be fair, sometimes they do. Musk saw genuine bloat at Twitter. I’m doubtful one can optimize that much out of WarnerBrothers. But Hollywood isn’t exactly known for being efficient.
That gets tricky: To the extent that an AI is just a tool — along the lines of a trained pair of hands executing a human prompter's specific, detailed instructions — the human prompter might qualify as an "author."
From the U.S. Copyright Office in January 2025:
"The Office affirms that existing principles of copyright law are flexible enough to apply to this new technology, as they have applied to technological innovations in the past. It concludes that the outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements.
"This can include situations where a human-authored work is perceptible in an AI output, or a human makes creative arrangements or modifications of the output, but not the mere provision of prompts.
"The Office confirms that the use of AI to assist in the process of creation or the inclusion of AI-generated material in a larger human-generated work does not bar copyrightability.
"It also finds that the case has not been made for changes to existing law to provide additional protection for AI-generated outputs."
https://www.copyright.gov/newsnet/2025/1060.html (emphasis and extra paragraphing added).
Every single CGI rendered frame of Shrek is protected by copyright because it was human authored. It they used a diffuser to make Shrek 7, the individual frames would not be protected by copyright but their arrangement into a movie could be. That's a hugely different legal situation (for instance, if I chopped it up and made my own remix of it that would be protected).
Short clips are doable, but the coherency duration before it goes weird just isn't there yet, unless you're OK with very short segments (like, single-digit seconds) between each AI-equivalent of a cut. That will probably improve, but the tech isn't there yet for "a lot", it's like CGI in the 90s rather than CGI as it is today.
That's aside from how AI output isn't copyrightable, which may or may not matter depending on if your goal is money or propaganda.
Citations?
I haven't, and would be genuinely curious if it is better than the AI short clip slop that appears on YouTube and really just needs to be taken out back and shot.
I have no doubt that its coming, I just haven't seen it yet.
FWIW, there are models which are better than the majority of the YouTube slop I've seen*; but even then, when I show short clips from e.g. Google's "Flow" generator to others, those others find the results unimpressive. Also, the voice range is weird, my experience playing with them it had a much harder time of creating a decent working-class British accent than Dick Van Dyke.
However, amongst the various issues Flow has, the most obvious is length, because even though Flow lets me "extend" a clip, it's not got enough coherency between each (8 second?) segment when I do.
The second biggest issue is that, as with Stable Diffusion before it, it quite often produces stuff you just don't want. Junk dealers don't care about that and use the first result, an artist can afford to do 10 attempts and pick the right one, and will care to, too. That's something I can at least expect will be solved, or has been on non-free tools (control nets etc.) even though I don't expect slop dealers to ever bother with them.
If each 8 seconds of video was actually Hollywood quality (they're not, in any sense including resolution) and they were coherent when extended (likewise, they're not), as there's 750 times 8 seconds in a 100 minute film, it would still be an existential threat to Hollywood if those segments cost $1333, because that's a million dollars and in the cost range of "micro-budget indie", rather than the tens of millions that even normal-indie films cost (before marketing etc.) or hundreds of millions that blockbusters cost.
I have no idea how video generators scale up in cost with time or resolution, let alone quality, so I don't want to make guesses on how much extra compute (or indeed training data) would be needed for a coherent 2 minute cut-equivalent at 4k. As I don't like the epistemic collapse we're already witnessing with clips from video games being passed off as coverage of warfare, I very much hope this is one of those things which fails to scale up.
* although even with early models, if you wield them as an artist rather than as a slop merchant you get interesting output; you may remember the Harry Potter Balenciaga videos from a few years back, same channel and you can see how things have changed: https://www.youtube.com/@demonflyingfox/videos
This is demonstrating the specific limitation I was talking about. And also, some of those scenes, if you pause on them, they've got the slightly-off vibes of GenAI content, a casual viewer is only missing that because the scenes change so quickly. Something something moonwalking gorilla.
An artist can make a work of art despite the limitations of whatever tool they use (and indeed may get a kick out of doing just that), that doesn't mean the tool can do everything.
I myself am working on a GenAI musical comedy sketch video, but it is only possible with current tech because there's a good opportunity to make cuts every few seconds.
They may become so, I don't know how resolution and temporal coherency scale, but right now Hollywood's biggest problem from China is that China's got 1.5 billion people who are just as capable of learning SFX as anyone in the US.
He arguably single handedly shifted the entire Overton window in the US to the right, and got his preferred candidate elected.
It's reasonable to assume that Ellison is interested in the exact same kind of power, but over the broader culture.
If the argument is that it was a stupid business decision, but he had other motives (clout, etc…), sure whatever.
At the time? Probably. With the benefit of hindsight? Probably not. Twitter would have made a killing on its own licensing its data to AI companies.
I'm reminded of a saying: "Just because they are out to get you, doesn't mean you're not paranoid."
That he was able to cut a lot from Twitter, doesn't mean he cut wisely, for reasons connected with reality. It survived the loss of teams dedicated to ongoing feature development, but the loss of teams dedicated to community management appears (from the outside) to have been the proximal cause of the loss of trust that many advertisers, users, and governments have had with the company. Cutting both at the same time suggests the action was not done from a place of wisdom, but rather that it was luck one of the cuts wasn't critical.
(This is what I expect given a Muntzing strategy: discover which components are load-baring by seeing what happens when they are removed. But when did I learn about Muntzing, and was it after Musk did his thing with Twitter?)
Once you start meddling with the money machine it's not just Net Profit = Revenue – All Expenses (COGS + Operating Expenses + Interest + Taxes)
Riefenstahl wasn't a journalist.
HBO Told 'The Pitt' to Make ICE Storyline More 'Balanced' https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2026/02/28/the-pitt-h...
See the career of Seema Verma from last DT admin.
The fact that it was cost effective, but required internal expertise was exactly what led the Trump administration to kill it.
Now they are transitioning to Cerner, the worse of the two major commerical EMRs by a fair margin, for many billions of dollars to the Kansas-based company, now owned by Oracle.
You can fill in the details of why this is happening by looking at where the CMS appointees at the time have landed in their post-government careers.
Linux is just as free (or free-er), and it's a ton better supported: why would these major companies not use it?
Netflix's CDN nodes are basically single-purpose appliances that do one thing: push video bytes to your screen as fast as possible. For that kind of workload FreeBSD's network stack was historically stronger, and the codebase was easier for a small team to reach into and tune aggressively. They've gotten individual servers past 100 Gbps of TLS-encrypted traffic. A lot of the optimizations they needed (kernel TLS offload, sendfile improvements, custom TCP tuning) they built themselves and contributed back to FreeBSD, and the kernel's size and structure made that practical in a way that would've been harder in Linux.
The other piece is licensing. BSD license is permissive, GPL isn't. Netflix wanted the option to make deep kernel modifications without being required to open source everything. They ended up open sourcing a lot of it anyway, but having the choice mattered.
Worth noting they only use FreeBSD for the CDN. All their backend services, recommendations, control plane, that's all Linux on AWS. So it's not that they rejected Linux, they just picked FreeBSD for the one job where it had a real edge.
GPL2 would've let them do that just fine as long as they didn't distribute the Linux kernel to someone else.
AGPL was invented to close that "gap".
I do not see how Netflix's primary business is any different than the businesses in the "Hollywood" categorization that also pay to make media and then sell it.
Apple and Amazon can be in a different category because making and selling media is an ancillary part of their business. Alphabet does not make or curate any media, it just distributes it.
Its like youtube if youtube red didnt fail
Youtube Red just got rebranded as Youtube Premium, and does not seem comparable because Youtube does not curate, it just sells advertising spots, and subscriptions to be able to skip ad breaks. You can watch any random person's content on Youtube or Youtube Premium, but you cannot on Netflix/Disney/etc.
That would be circular. The author was trying to show how much smaller hollywood media companies are than big tech.
Netflix owns distribution and owns+sells VFX and animation services via Eyeline. Most "Netflix orignals" aren't actually produced by Netflix - Netflix just takes a capital stake in a production that was already in the works by an existing production company.
This made Netflix closer to Valve, and allows their IR team to make a valid case that they should be compared against (and thus deserve a valuation) comparable to other tech companies.
Oracle was always an Ellison driven enterprise, but neither David nor Megan had much aptitude or interest in enterprise SaaS, and a newer generation of operators took the reigns at Oracle in the 2010s like Catz, Hurd, Scilia, Magouyrk, and even Kurian before he left for GCP.
Given the ferocity with which this acquisition was fought (much more ferocious that similarly political fraught M&As like Sinclair) and the relatively weak fundamentals, there clearly is an emotional and family succession planning aspect to it.
Ellison has taken similar decisions with an emotional lens previously, such as his support for Steve Jobs retaking control of Apple.
The Skydance-WBD acquisition was extremely messy because emotion was clearly involved.
It remains to be seen whether his rightward turn is just pandering to Trump to get stuff done or if he's gone of the rails. If its the latter, the Paramount acquisition will likely be regarded as one of the biggest failures of all time.
Don't think of this in terms on a financial return on investment. A half dozen people control almost all American media because the fear is that without the manufactured consent, the entire system is going to collapse. Historically, that's tended to result in heads on spikes or being hunt from the city walls.
Perhaps it's nihilistic of me but I thought that after the 2024 election, we're now beyond the point where any of this is going to get better through electoral politics. Any democracy now is performative. Both sides are bought and paid for. There is no significant, organized resistance to any of this. Material conditions will continue to get worse.
Think about it: it doesn't matter if you, as Larry Ellison or Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, have $200 billion or $300 billion or $400 billion. Like that has no impact on your life. There is nothing you can possibly buy that requires more wealth. The goal now is to preserve the system at any cost.
WTF is this slop? I've never seen a an article so riddled with analogies and pop culture references that actively degrade the ability to understand whatever argument might be lurking behind the obscurantism.
What body of work has Scott Galloway produced that should cause me or any other reader to suffer this kind of self-indulgence normally found in a 8th grade creative writing class, in the hopes of learning something meaningful about these topics?
Gurus are going to guru I guess.
Whereas I definitely prefer reading PG’s writing over listening to it, interestingly enough.
Just personal preference. Scott’s a good storyteller; if you let him finish the story. :)
you should say what you're talking about because I for one have no idea.
Also, it's not real money, it's debt equity. Equity transfers are just rich people toys. They move the actual cost into the entity they purchase, and if it fails, whatever, it didn't cost them anything.
Shares of businesses with excessive debt relative to income do not do well for their shareholders.
The debt from the Time Warner and other purchases dragged ATT down from the top spot to 3rd, and boosted Tmobile to the top. The shareholders of ATT lost and the shareholders of Tmobile gained.
No idea why OP alluded to it rather than just said it though.
Not dissimilar from Musk buying Twitter, objectively he overpaid by a ton for a business that wasn’t thriving. But I think time has shown that his purchase has paid political and ideological dividends. Which might be worth the money to him.
It's all a grift.