New Skydance Worth Less Than Half of Warner Brothers, Paramount Combined | Hacker News Reader

New Skydance Worth Less Than Half of Warner Brothers, Paramount Combined

techdirt.com

43 pointscdrnsf11 comments

Proof that Techdirt should stay in its lane.

The media mergers happening now are a pure survival play. Margins are collapsing, ad rates are collapsing, audiences are fragmented. Every media company is trying to scale up to survive terrible market conditions.

Reducing audience fragmentation and being able to negotiate better ad rates are the only way to do that. These companies were going to lose all of this money (and more) if they didn't merge. These layoffs are happening regardless.

It's funny because in the tech industry with funding drying up the exact same thing is happening but editorial is so happy to dunk on people they hate that they're too dumb to see the obvious.

M&A accelerates in a down market. QED.

Audiences are fragmented because they chose to fragment them. They should have just kept all their stuff on netflix and downsized a bit.

Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.

You mean getting extremely rich because they borrowed enormously to pay out to existing shareholders (and, of course, themselves)?

This is some crap reporting.

The source for the headline, Variety, says pre-merger “Warner Bros Discovery had a market capitalization of $77.7 billion and Paramount was around $11 billion. Today, Skydance has a market cap of under $40 billion — less than half the predecessor companies’ combined value” [1].

Of course it does. It has a bunch of debt. The correct metric is enterprise value [2].

Skydance is currently about $36bn equity value, $75bn debt value with $8bn cash. $110 net debt, $118bn with cash. Not much of a haircut given rates went up in the interim.

The real story is in the credit markets [3].

[1] https://variety.com/2026/film/news/skydance-market-cap-less-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_value

[3] https://bondblox.com/news/paramounts-bonds-weaken-further

Let’s hope that continued data center debt sell pressure further squeezes Larry.

Oracle is down -50% in the last 12 months so Larry might be feeling the squeeze already. And that's after firing 20k people in the last year or so.

I hope the squeeze has barbed hooks so he can’t get out so easily

I don’t keep track of oracle stock but just glancing at it it looks like there was a rapid spike before the drop, like quite a bit larger than the market overall? And then it dropped back to previous level. So they effectively missed out on some growth over that period but the -50% isn’t as dramatic in context.

They had the same peak as all the tech stock during CoVid. But they are far away from their all time high.

The peak was in September ‘25, so nothing to do with Covid?

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