Paramount will put the newly merged Warner Bros. Discovery back on the market on Saturday, four days after its takeover closes. The plan is for the company to be acquired fourteen more times before 2030. Call it what it is: a perpetual M&A flywheel.
Honestly, this is the move. Paramount spent years fighting rival bids and an antitrust review, and the whole time the stock only ever moved on deal news. Movies, shows, cable networks? Legacy. Dealmaking is the content now.
Under the roadmap, each new owner holds the asset for fourteen weeks, then flips it at a premium funded by whatever debt is left. Bankers collect a fee every lap. Shareholders ride the pop. Nobody has to greenlight anything.
"We asked ourselves what Paramount is actually good at, and the answer was getting bought and buying things," one executive told me on Saturday. "So we are leaning in. The studio is a tax loss with a logo on it. The real IP is the Form 8-K."
