Episode Transcript
Transcripts are displayed as originally observed. Some content, including advertisements may have changed.
Use Ctrl + F to search
0:00
This podcast is supported by Apollo
0:02
Global Management, ensuring a brighter, bolder
0:04
future means investing in tomorrow today.
0:06
That's why Apollo is financing solutions
0:09
to some of the world's most
0:11
complex challenges. Apollo's customized
0:13
capital solutions for businesses help
0:15
drive innovation and growth, powering
0:17
a more resilient future. Apollo,
0:19
investing in tomorrow today. Learn
0:21
more at apollo.com. You
0:24
know success when you see it. Or you
0:26
think you do. The people in the
0:28
spotlight. What about those
0:30
small business masterminds who succeed at making
0:32
their money work harder? They do
0:34
that by having a business bank account with QuickBooks
0:36
Money, which now earns 5% annual
0:39
percentage yield. Making
0:41
your money work as hard as you do? That's how
0:43
you business differently. Learn more
0:45
about QuickBooks Money at quickbooks.com/5APY.
0:49
Banking services provided by Green Dot Bank. Member
0:51
FDIC. Only funds and envelopes earn APY. APY
0:53
can change at any time. Bloomberg
0:58
Audio Studios. Podcasts,
1:01
radio, news. He's
1:05
a money stuff guy. Yeah,
1:07
you'll be great. Hello
1:11
and welcome to the Money Stuff Podcast, your
1:13
weekly podcast where we talk about stuff related
1:16
to money and Elon Musk. I'm Matt
1:18
Levine and I write the Money Stuff column for
1:20
Bloomberg Appent. And I'm Katie
1:22
Greifeld. I'm a reporter for Bloomberg News and
1:24
an anchor for Bloomberg Television. What
1:27
are we talking about today, Katie? Okay, we're
1:29
obviously talking about Elon Musk and the
1:31
results of the shareholder vote, the two
1:34
prong issues there. We're going to talk about
1:36
an extremely messy deal.
1:38
We're talking about the Paramount
1:40
Skydance deal. And then
1:42
we're going to talk about mouse jigglers and
1:45
Wells Fargo and getting fired. Sounds
1:47
great. Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo. You
1:49
get the money stuff guy. It's
1:55
Friday morning in America. Elon
1:57
Musk has gotten his money. He has. I
2:00
mean, sort of. He had the vote for his
2:02
money. Did he get his money? Complicated question. Yeah,
2:04
TBD on that point. So the shareholder
2:07
vote happened for Tesla and I think
2:09
it was... I think this
2:11
is the most boring outcome, actually. So
2:14
they had a vote on two things, right? One
2:16
is should Elon Musk get his money and the
2:18
other was should they reincorporate to Texas, right? If
2:20
they voted against him getting his money, that would
2:22
have been like some real fireworks. Like you have
2:24
quit in a huff last night, who knows? But
2:27
they voted in favor of him getting his money, so he's
2:29
going to stay. And then I sort
2:31
of thought they would vote against moving
2:33
to Texas because my impression was that
2:36
institutional shareholders like the predictability and protections
2:38
of Delaware law and that
2:40
Elon Musk being kind of a whimsical dude,
2:42
they thought it would be nice to have
2:44
a court that would rein him in. But
2:46
no, more shareholders voted to move to Texas
2:48
than voted for his pay. Yeah.
2:50
And I mean, and 72% voted for his
2:52
pay. So the support for the move to
2:55
Texas was... Broad. Yeah.
2:57
So this is all driven by the fact that
2:59
earlier this year, a Delaware court struck down that
3:02
2018 pay package that he got,
3:04
right? So in 2018, Tesla gave him a
3:06
bunch of options that
3:09
if he hit some very ambitious milestones, he'd get
3:11
$56 billion. He hit all the milestones, he
3:14
got all the options. The shareholder sued
3:17
saying that the process of paying him
3:19
was too conflicted. And early this
3:21
year, a Delaware court said, we agree, we're taking
3:23
back the options. And so Tesla is voting to
3:25
give him back the options and to get out
3:27
of Delaware because they don't like that. And
3:30
I remember when I wrote about the court
3:32
decision earlier this year, I was like, this
3:34
seems kind of wrong, right? Like, I'm not
3:36
like a devoted Elon Musk fan
3:38
here, but like the shareholders voted to
3:41
give him the money. The court decided that the vote
3:43
wasn't fully informed, but it was pretty informed. Like they
3:45
knew how much money they were giving him and like
3:47
what the targets were and he hit the targets and
3:49
they were happy. So it
3:51
struck me as kind of a weird decision.
3:53
It might've been right in the law, but
3:56
it was protective of shareholders in a way
3:58
that like the shareholders clearly didn't want. want,
4:00
right? Like the shareholders got the benefit of their
4:02
bargain, which was Elon Musk took the company to
4:05
$650 billion. And this court
4:08
decision seemed to kind of interfere in
4:10
the relationship between the company and its
4:12
shareholders. And I think
4:14
that's what the vote last night says, right? Like
4:16
not only did the shareholders vote to bring back
4:19
the pay package, but they also said, yeah, we
4:21
think that like this Delaware decision was wrong
4:23
and we now reject Delaware
4:25
law, which I think is kind of
4:27
an interesting outcome. Right? Like, yeah. This
4:30
is a weird company. It's got a weird CEO
4:32
and a weird relationship with him. And it's got
4:34
a lot of retail shareholders who are maybe more
4:37
inclined to vote for
4:39
like a populist move to Texas than
4:41
like the average institutional shareholders. But a
4:43
lot of institutional shareholders voted
4:45
to move to Texas. And like ISS, the
4:47
proxy advisor said, yeah, you should vote to
4:49
move to Texas. So I'm
4:52
interested to see going forward, will other companies copy
4:54
this? Because like I would have thought that a
4:56
lot of companies would say, I would like to
4:58
have a little bit less shareholder protection and a
5:00
little bit more freehand for the board and the
5:02
CEO. But if I actually try
5:04
to do that, my shareholders will say, no,
5:07
no, we want the protections. We see you
5:09
trying to get away from a sort of strict
5:11
corporate law and we're going to vote
5:13
against it. But now the shareholders voted for it
5:15
at Tesla. And I don't know, are other companies
5:17
going to follow along? I mean, it'll
5:20
be interesting to see what this means
5:22
for Texas. Obviously, the business courts to
5:24
Delaware are extremely well established. Comparatively, Texas
5:26
is not exactly there. So I don't
5:28
know, maybe we'll get some precedent sent
5:30
there. But I mean, you made the
5:32
point in your sort of walk up
5:35
column that if you think about the
5:37
reasons why the 2018 pay
5:39
package was voided by that
5:41
Delaware judge, there was this idea
5:43
that the conflicts of interest in
5:46
the board and other details weren't
5:48
properly disclosed and well known. And I
5:50
feel like with this vote, obviously, everything's
5:52
out in the open. So I think that I wrote
5:54
yesterday is that like so the judge found that in
5:56
2018, the board was sort of in the pocket
5:58
of Elon Musk. and the proxy
6:00
didn't fully disclose all of that, right?
6:02
And so this year, this vote, the
6:05
proxy just discloses the judge's entire opinion,
6:07
like it's attached to the back. So
6:09
if you're interested to know what conflicts
6:12
were involved in the 2018 decision to pay Elon Musk,
6:14
you can go read the opinion and get like all
6:16
of the, like the worst case for the conflicts. But
6:19
I made the point yesterday that there
6:21
are new conflicts, right? There's all this
6:23
stuff about Elon doing AI at other
6:26
companies, his other companies, if he doesn't
6:28
get his money at Tesla. Earlier
6:30
this year, Elon Musk asking for another pay package.
6:33
This was back when he still had these options
6:35
before the judge took them away. He asked for
6:37
another big pay package to get his stock ownership
6:39
up at Tesla. And he said, if I don't
6:41
get another big pay package, I won't be able
6:43
to build AI at Tesla. There's that reporting about
6:45
how there were like some Nvidia chips that were
6:47
earmarked for Tesla that he called up Nvidia and
6:49
said, no, let's send them to X instead of
6:51
Twitter. So there's all
6:53
this stuff about his conflicts of interest,
6:55
his threats, his like demands for new
6:57
compensation. All this stuff is not really
6:59
addressed in the current Tesla proxy.
7:02
And like, I don't know, if I were a
7:04
disgruntled shareholder, I'd be writing another lawsuit being like,
7:06
well, there's more stuff you didn't disclose. But
7:08
that said, like, you know, as I said, like I
7:11
think that the meaning of last night's vote is that
7:14
Delaware's interference here is wrong and not what
7:16
shareholders want and not what is good for
7:19
shareholders. I do wonder what was on
7:21
the mind of the large retail shareholder base, not
7:23
to speak of them all as a monolith, but
7:25
I mean, in many ways, this was just seen
7:27
as a referendum on Musk
7:29
and his leadership of the company. And
7:32
the point has been made, it's very
7:34
well known that the retail shareholders of
7:36
Tesla love Elon Musk. They're there because
7:38
they love Elon Musk. Tesla has a
7:41
much more retail shareholder based on a lot of
7:43
companies, but like almost half institutional. And those
7:45
people voted pretty strongly in favor of moving to
7:47
Texas and also in favor of the pay. More
7:50
for Texas than for the pay. It's an impressive
7:52
outcome for him. A month ago, like he was
7:54
clearly focused on his AI stuff about other companies
7:56
and five months ago, he was asking for more
7:58
money from Tesla. this traumatic experience has
8:00
brought them closer together so that now he will
8:03
spend more time on Tesla and not demand more
8:05
money. Or if it's like after
8:07
winning the vote this week, he will go back
8:09
to messing around with XAI and ignoring Tesla. I
8:11
don't know, I don't know. I kinda lean
8:14
towards the latter, but what do I know? But I
8:16
will say. Me too. Like he's a
8:18
short attention span, right? Like he's gonna go do something
8:20
else next week. Yeah, that's a very
8:22
strong bear case. Like that doesn't, even though
8:24
we're past the vote, 72% voted for the
8:26
pay package. It
8:30
doesn't fix the problem of Musk
8:32
is distracted. It seems like he has more
8:34
fun things going on than Tesla struggles right
8:36
now. And you've seen all of these big
8:39
Tesla bulls come out. I'm thinking about Dan
8:41
Ives at Wedbush saying, this removes a huge
8:43
overhang for the stock, Tesla market cap to
8:45
a trillion dollars. I don't necessarily
8:48
know if that's the case. I don't think Elon
8:50
being distracted is necessarily a bear case. I
8:52
think the counter argument is SpaceX,
8:54
where he doesn't seem to have a ton
8:56
of day-to-day involvement, there's a professional team running
8:59
it, and it's very
9:01
successful. But also it's got the Elon Musk Halo,
9:03
which helps it like raise money and sort of
9:05
be high profile. You can tell a similar story
9:07
about a Tesla where like some team of managers
9:10
run it as a competent car company without doing
9:12
weird stuff. And Elon
9:14
Musk remains the CEO and biggest shareholder
9:16
and sort of figurehead such that it
9:18
has a high stock market valuation and
9:20
can raise money from retail investors. And
9:22
it's just like always in the news.
9:24
That's not the worst outcome for Tesla,
9:26
I don't think. I don't know that
9:28
having him in the day-to-day design process
9:31
for the cars is super additive. Like,
9:33
I don't know, everyone seems to think
9:35
the Cybertruck is really ugly and that's
9:37
clearly his baby. So maybe like a
9:39
distracted but happy Elon is the kind
9:41
of best outcome for Tesla. Maybe,
9:43
I'm just thinking about again, like the
9:45
fundamentals of the EV industry right now.
9:47
It feels like every single automaker has,
9:49
I'm exaggerating, but has scaled back EV
9:52
production. There's this big leading into hybrids
9:54
where it seems like the
9:56
American driver is also going. Tesla's never gonna
9:59
make a hybrid. Maybe I'll be proven
10:01
wrong, but. Yeah, but it's not with, Elon
10:04
paying more attention to it is not gonna make you make
10:06
a hybrid. True, true. I don't
10:08
know. I mean, SpaceX is a good
10:10
example, a good counterweight, because it
10:13
seems like cracking the private
10:15
space industry would be harder
10:17
than cracking the EV industry.
10:19
So, and SpaceX did
10:21
that. So maybe things will
10:24
be fine at Tesla. I guess the point that
10:26
I'm making is that I've interviewed
10:28
all of these automaker chief executives.
10:30
I'm talking to the Kia COO
10:32
in like two hours. Like the
10:34
EV market is in a storm
10:37
right now. Yeah, like
10:39
the governance is sort of like unrelated to that.
10:41
Elon Musk is not going to fix the EV market.
10:44
And I don't know. I mean, like you can tell
10:46
the story that like the EV market is in America
10:48
is partly politicized and like
10:50
that slows down adoption and Elon
10:52
Musk could help, you know,
10:54
depoliticize EV adoption or politicize it the other
10:56
way. But I don't know. I don't really
10:58
see that. Like I just, I think that
11:00
at this point, Tesla, the company faces the
11:02
same headwinds as every other, you know, EV
11:04
manufacturer, except that it is only
11:06
an EV manufacturer. And Tesla,
11:09
the stock has just the sort of vague halo
11:11
effect of like, it's the one public way to
11:13
invest in Elon Musk. And so it trades at
11:16
a premium, because if you like Elon Musk's whole
11:18
shtick and you don't care much about EVs, but
11:20
you're just like, how do I buy like the
11:22
Elon Musk thing? The only way to
11:24
do it as a public investor is to buy Tesla stock.
11:26
And so it trades on that. And, you
11:30
know, what particular parts of the Elon
11:32
Musk empire are conducted in Tesla as
11:34
opposed to at his private companies? Like
11:36
doesn't necessarily matter that much for
11:39
the price of the stock. I'm more thinking of like
11:41
not him making good decisions for Tesla, but him
11:43
stopping good decisions that could be made at Tesla.
11:46
Like you think about him, what,
11:48
firing the supercharger team and then rehiring a bunch
11:50
of them. That wasn't great.
11:52
Like wavering on plans for
11:54
a much cheaper EV model.
11:56
That wasn't great. That did shake a
11:58
lot of, even. the biggest Tesla
12:01
bulls conviction in the stock. And then I
12:03
don't know, the robot taxi dreams seem
12:05
to be, and the Cybertruck too, seemed
12:07
to be like an expensive waste of
12:09
money. We could have done this on yesterday
12:12
as the thing. Yeah, we
12:14
probably should have. We thought that there would
12:16
be like late breaking news, but in fact there was
12:18
early breaking news and then it turned out to be
12:20
true. By the way, I would have been so excited.
12:22
Like the outcome I was really rooting for once he
12:24
tweeted yesterday, Thursday, once
12:27
he tweeted on Thursday that he
12:29
had won the vote. Obviously the outcome I was rooting for
12:31
is that he'd lost the vote and was gonna get sued,
12:33
but didn't come to pass. The tweet
12:35
was true. That would have been delicious. This
12:42
podcast is supported by Apollo Global
12:45
Management. When it comes to building
12:47
and financing stronger businesses, Apollo turned
12:49
some of the world's most complex
12:51
challenges into growth opportunities. Apollo's customized
12:54
capital solutions help drive innovation and
12:56
growth, turning the great businesses of
12:58
today into leaders of tomorrow. As
13:00
one of the world's largest alternative
13:02
asset managers, Apollo is helping to
13:05
fuel the real economy by generating
13:07
investment grade credit, helping to fill
13:09
gaps in America's financial ecosystem and
13:11
providing greater access to more resilient
13:14
and diverse pools of capital. By
13:16
providing companies with access to flexible
13:18
financing solutions and partnering with management
13:20
teams to help grow their businesses,
13:22
Apollo is there every step of
13:24
the way to drive positive outcomes
13:26
for companies and power economic growth.
13:29
Apollo, investing in tomorrow,
13:31
today. Learn more at
13:33
apollo.com/private investment grade. Life
13:37
needs more Cedar Point, and that's what you'll get
13:39
with the 2024 summer pass. Get
13:42
unlimited visits through Labor Day, plus free
13:44
parking, enjoy spectacular rides, unforgettable live shows,
13:47
and drive the sky on top thrill
13:49
too. The world's only triple launch vertical
13:51
speedway. It's all yours for just three
13:53
payments of $25 after
13:56
initial payment. Online only, plus
13:58
applicable taxes and fees, but hurry this... for
14:00
long last long. So what are you waiting
14:02
for? Get your summer pass today only at
14:04
cedarpoint.com. And
14:14
now we're back from the ad break. We heard
14:16
from our future selves. I think I
14:18
said last week that we're really learning that time is
14:20
a concept and we're doing that again because now it's
14:22
you and I talking on a Thursday afternoon. We've
14:25
traveled back in time to Thursday afternoon.
14:28
It was nice. Thursday afternoon. Here we are on Thursday
14:30
again. Here we are and we
14:32
traveled back in time. Yeah. Why live
14:34
in a Friday when you can live
14:36
in a perpetual Thursday? So it's the
14:38
motto of this podcast. Absolutely. Let's
14:40
talk about skydance and paramount and
14:43
the deal that will never
14:45
be question mark. It's pretty
14:47
wild. Yeah. We have talked about
14:50
it once on this. I
14:53
forget what we said, but now we're
14:55
sort of talking about, we're
14:57
talking about it's obituary because. It's not paramount
15:00
obituary. No, not yet. At least
15:02
this deal's obituary because national
15:04
amusement read Sherry Redstone stopped
15:07
the deal. It's not going to
15:09
happen with skydance at least. Yeah. I
15:11
love it. I love it. It's such a complicated
15:13
deal because of a very
15:16
simple thing, which is that Sherry Redstone
15:18
owns national amusement. National amusement owns some
15:21
movie theaters and also a block of
15:23
paramount stock. Paramount is like an $8
15:25
billion public company. It has a lot
15:28
of interesting, you know, TV and movie
15:30
assets and people want to
15:32
buy it. And Sherry Redstone, who inherited it
15:34
from her father, seems to want
15:36
to sell it, although no one's really sure. And
15:39
the thing about national amusement is that
15:41
it owns around 5% of
15:44
Paramount's stock, but it owns
15:46
most of the voting stock. Most of Paramount's
15:48
stock doesn't vote. So Sherry Redstone, although she has
15:50
like a fairly small economic interest in Paramount,
15:53
has voting control over Paramount. So that
15:55
means anyone who wants to buy Paramount
15:58
has to get her approval. because
16:00
she controls the vote, even though
16:02
she doesn't have that much stock. But it
16:04
also means that like anyone who wants to deal
16:06
with her, you know, has to pay her off
16:08
at a premium. And then the
16:10
rest of the Paramount shareholders, if
16:13
they don't get the same deal, are going to complain. And
16:15
that's the problem with doing a deal here. And
16:17
it sort of looked like someone would find a
16:20
way to overcome that problem. And nobody did. And
16:22
the deal just fell apart. It fell
16:24
apart really quickly, too. And it
16:26
is an incredible end because,
16:28
first of all, this is something
16:30
that Sherry Redstone originally was campaigning
16:32
for for months. And Ellison
16:35
and Skydance did switch it around a
16:37
lot and tried to make this work
16:39
and revise their offer a bunch of
16:41
times. And then just this week, it
16:43
fell apart. And there's been a lot of different
16:46
reporting as to why. A lot of
16:48
people familiar with the matter have commented
16:51
on this to, you know, different outlets.
16:53
The Wall Street Journal, I found
16:56
this explanation satisfying that basically they
16:58
reported that she feared potential shareholder
17:00
litigation over a deal that her
17:02
critics said would disadvantage ordinary investors
17:05
in Paramount and the seems
17:07
key legal fees that might eat into her
17:09
family's fortune. That would make sense. When
17:11
you say she was advocating for this deal, and
17:13
then it fell apart really rapidly, I think that
17:15
what happened is that originally
17:18
Skydance came to Sherry Redstone
17:20
and said, we want to do a deal
17:22
with you where we give you money for
17:24
national amusements. And then we
17:26
simultaneously negotiated a deal with Paramount so that like, when
17:28
we acquire national amusements, we end up in control of
17:30
Paramount and we can sort of do the
17:33
merger that we want with Paramount. And Sherry Redstone was
17:35
like, yeah, it sounds good. And they
17:37
offered to pay her a lot of money
17:39
for her national amusement stake. But then over
17:41
time, as they negotiated with the board, the
17:43
board of Paramount wanted more stuff for the
17:46
regular public shareholders. Like they said, if you
17:48
just give Sherry Redstone all this money and
17:50
don't give anything to the regular shareholders, one
17:53
that's going to look bad, it's going to be
17:55
bad for our fiduciary duties as a board to
17:57
protect the public shareholders. But then also, we'll get
17:59
soon. you'll get sued, everyone gets sued. So
18:01
what we need to do is strike a better deal
18:03
for the public shareholders and Skydance was
18:05
like, sure, yeah, we can do that. We can take
18:07
some of the money we're going to get to Shari
18:10
Redstone and give it to the public shareholders instead. And
18:12
then everyone will be happier. Except that then Shari Redstone
18:14
wasn't happier because they're taking money from her and giving
18:16
it to the shareholders. So I think part of why
18:18
the deal fell apart is it's
18:21
almost impossible to just accomplish this, to do a
18:23
deal that is good for Shari Redstone and also
18:25
doesn't get you sued by shareholders. And I think
18:27
she eventually concluded that she's going to get sued
18:29
by shareholders and it wasn't worth it. But also,
18:31
they did try to accomplish it, but that meant
18:33
taking money away from her part of the deal.
18:35
And that made her less inclined to do it,
18:37
right? If she was getting all the money, she
18:40
could pay the legal fees. But if she's getting
18:42
less of the money, then like, she's still has
18:44
to pay the legal fees, she doesn't want to
18:46
do the deal. It almost feels
18:48
like a golden shares situation, which
18:50
doesn't really exist in America, but
18:52
it exists more formally in the
18:54
UK and increasingly in China. And
18:56
it just seems impossible to have
18:59
good governance in this type of situation.
19:01
This company has always sort of had famously bad
19:03
governance. I mean, like the situation is just bad governance,
19:05
right? I mean, someone who inherited
19:07
the company and has a fairly
19:09
small minority economic interest in it,
19:11
but who has complete voting control
19:13
and can sort of block any deals
19:16
she doesn't like, is an unusual situation.
19:18
And because it is a big public media company,
19:21
it has like a fairly independent board of directors,
19:23
or it has had a fairly dependent board of
19:25
directors over at sometimes who have gotten in fights
19:27
with Sherry Redstone and have tried to like take
19:29
away her voting control. And even
19:31
now, you know, like I think the impression is
19:33
that some members of the board were
19:36
the one sort of saying to Sherry, like, this deal
19:38
is not going to work, you're going to get sued.
19:41
It's not sufficiently, you know, protective of minority
19:43
shareholders. The other thing is like, if Sherry
19:45
Redstone is worried about getting sued, one thing
19:47
that could potentially help is like asking the
19:51
other shareholders to vote to approve the deal.
19:53
So most of Paramount's stock doesn't
19:55
have any voting rights. And so
19:57
it's just like whatever the board agrees
19:59
to. Sherry Redstone can just ratify.
20:02
But she was thinking about conditioning
20:04
the merger on a majority of
20:06
the non-voting shareholders, holding
20:09
a vote and having them vote to approve it.
20:11
Because then if they approved it, she'd be less
20:13
likely to get sued. But my understanding
20:15
is that Skydense didn't like that idea because they were
20:17
like, you know, we're giving you this money, we wanna
20:20
actually have a deal. We don't wanna have to worry
20:22
about the non-voting shareholders turning it down. Well,
20:24
they have to do something. This is a
20:26
company in a struggling industry with enormous amounts
20:28
of debt, but Matt, I have good news.
20:31
The good news is that in a
20:33
moment like this, when you're searching eyes,
20:35
are looking for the CEO, the good
20:37
news is that there's not one CEO,
20:39
there's three CEOs in this situation. I
20:42
think when we last talked about this situation, I
20:44
said something like, having three CEOs is really a
20:46
sign that you're gonna do a deal really soon
20:49
because you can't just run the company with three
20:51
CEOs. But now, here they are, they've got three
20:53
CEOs and no deal. I know, I love it.
20:55
There are some rumors they're gonna replace those three
20:57
CEOs with their fourth different CEO, but it isn't.
20:59
Yeah, there's sort of this monolith just called
21:02
the Office of the CEO, which is incredible.
21:04
And definitely at the time, it was like,
21:06
okay, this is just a band-aid weird situation
21:08
holding pattern until a deal is done, and
21:11
maybe it'll go back to being a more
21:13
typical structure. But for right now, they have
21:15
three CEOs and apparently it
21:17
has a plan for going forward.
21:19
The Office of the CEO, CNBC,
21:21
obtained a memo that they released
21:23
on Wednesday saying that
21:26
they're going to remain open to exploring strategic
21:28
alternatives that create value for shareholders. They
21:30
also said that they're going to continue
21:32
to focus on executing the strategic plan
21:34
that they unveiled in the last couple
21:37
weeks. So we'll see.
21:39
I love them, they're fighting for their jobs. They're
21:42
really fighting, but again, they need to
21:44
do something. In one of the reports,
21:47
there's just been so much on this,
21:49
but apparently a special committee of directors
21:51
recommended that Paramount could not continue as
21:54
a stand-alone business. So something
21:56
needs to get done here. And then Moody's was out
21:58
this week, warning, and this was prior to the- the
22:00
collapse that unless there's some
22:02
sort of strategic transaction that comes
22:05
along with cost cutting opportunities, basically they're going
22:07
to get downgraded as well. Yeah, it's
22:09
not a good situation. The impression I get is
22:11
that this deal is pretty dead. There was another
22:13
suitor, right? Sony and Apollo were looking at the
22:15
company and that deal seems to have faded away
22:18
because in part, I think because they were never
22:20
really in with Sherry Redstone
22:22
and she, you know, as the company comes
22:24
along with cost cutting opportunities, basically they're going
22:26
to get downgraded as well. Yeah, it's
22:28
not a good situation. The impression I get is
22:30
that this deal is pretty dead. There was another
22:32
suitor, right? Sony and Apollo were looking at the
22:35
company and that deal seems to have faded away
22:37
because in part, I think because they were never
22:39
really in with Sherry Redstone
22:41
and she, you know, as the controlling vote.
22:43
So it's a little unclear what happens next.
22:46
And also in deal talk, there's Edgar
22:48
Bronfman. Edgar Bronfman. Who's
22:52
like talking about buying national amusements,
22:54
I think. Yeah. The impression that
22:56
I get is that as this
22:58
deal collapses, the next plan, besides
23:00
like finding out who the CEO is,
23:03
the next plan is for Sherry Redstone to
23:05
think about selling national amusements as just like
23:07
a single thing. So she would just sell
23:09
national amusements and then whoever buys it, it
23:11
would be their problem to deal with like
23:13
the weird governance structure at Paramount and to
23:15
try to find a way to
23:17
impose their will on Paramount and like, you know,
23:20
appointing a CEO to control the Paramount and deal
23:22
with the minority shareholders and everything else. That just
23:24
wouldn't be her problem. She would just sell national
23:26
amusements and then the new person would step into
23:29
her shoes and figure it all out. One reader,
23:31
you know, if you could suggest a really
23:33
good trade, which is that she should sell
23:35
national amusements to AMC, which one owns
23:38
a movie theater chain and two
23:41
keeps raising money for moo mestock investment.
23:43
Yeah. And then AMC could sell the
23:45
Paramount shares to Skydance and everyone
23:47
could be better off. I don't know if that's a
23:50
viable alternative. That's a pretty good idea. It's pretty good.
23:52
We've had an antitrust with AMC. I don't know. There
23:54
was one sell side note that suggested
23:57
this was from Loop Capital that Warner
23:59
Brothers Discovery.
Podchaser is the ultimate destination for podcast data, search, and discovery. Learn More