Warner Bros Discovery’s board has urged its shareholders to reject Paramount’s $108bn hostile bid for the Hollywood studio, calling its attempt to gatecrash the deal “inferior” to the terms agreed with Netflix.
In a sharply worded letter to shareholders on Wednesday, the WBD board called the Paramount offer — its seventh bid since October — “illusory” because it is backstopped by an Ellison family trust rather than a personal guarantee by Larry Ellison, one of America’s richest people.
Paramount had “consistently misled WBD shareholders that its proposed transaction has a ‘full backstop’ from the Ellison family”, the board wrote in the letter. “It does not, and never has.”