Netflix CEO Sets Record Straight On Trump Rumors After Warner Bros. Deal Fizzles

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos gave his first interview since the company pulled out of their deal to acquire Warner Bros., saying contrary to the rumors, it wasn’t President Trump’s influence that killed the merger.

The entertainment exec called the competing offer from Paramount “irrational” and claimed he had no regrets about how it all played out. Sarandos said it came down to having a set price amount they weren’t willing to go beyond and being outbid by David Ellison’s rival offer.

“We had a very tight range that we’d be willing to pay and made that offer back when we closed this deal,” Sarandos told Lucas Shaw of Bloomberg in an interview published Saturday. “I’m happy where we got in and happy where we got out.”

Rumors swirled that the Department of Justice may have influenced the breakdown, or that Trump himself may have had sway. But Sarandos said those narratives are false.

“I don’t know that there was growing political resistance,” the Netflix exec said. “It was a growing narrative of political resistance. But we were on a normal regulatory path. … This story has been fed out for everybody, but it’s just not accurate. We were not only involved with the DOJ, we were involved with 50 regulatory bodies around the world. These things have been going exactly the way they should.”

Sarandos told Shaw that Trump “stayed completely neutral on this.”

“The truth of it is, someone was going to lose it for a dollar,” Sarandos said of the deal. “And the quicker you accepted that, the better.”

Shaw described Paramount as being an “unusual other buyer,” which Sarandos agreed with.

“Unusual, yeah, unusual, irrational, whatever words you want to use in that,” he replied. “It’ll be fascinating to see the next steps. I have been on the record a lot in the last two weeks talking about what I think the future looks like. I’m confident in our future that we’re not impacted by all that. In fact, maybe it’s to our advantage. But I hope I’m wrong for the sake of the industry.”

Warner Bros. agreed in December to an $82.7 billion deal with Netflix. Paramount responded with several hostile takeover bids over the following months, culminating in a surprise twist as the streaming giant bowed out in February.

“…this transaction was always a ‘nice to have’ at the right price, not a ‘must have’ at any price,” Sarandos and Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters said in a statement at the time, as The Daily Wire previously reported.