Paramount Skydance on Monday launched a hostile, $108.4 billion bid to buy Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), days after Warner agreed to be acquired by Netflix for $82.7 billion.
Paramount is going straight to WBD’s shareholders with an all-cash offer of $30 per share, and it noted that its offer provides shareholders $18 billion more cash than the Netflix deal, which offered $23.25 in cash and $4.50 in Netflix shares for a total of $27.75 per share.
Paramount is bidding for all of WBD, while Netflix’s deal with the company only includes its Hollywood studios and streaming business.
CNBC reported on Monday that these were the very terms from Paramount that WBD’s board rejected a week ago.
“We believe the WBD Board of Directors is pursuing an inferior proposal which exposes shareholders to a mix of cash and stock, an uncertain future trading value of the Global Networks linear cable business and a challenging regulatory approval process,” Paramount CEO David Ellison said in a statement.
Paramount’s offer is backstopped with equity financing from the Ellison family and the private-equity firm RedBird Capital, in addition to $54 billion of debt commitments from Bank of America, Citi, and Apollo.
Netflix came out on top on Friday after winning a bidding war against Paramount and Comcast, but Paramount’s hostile bid is sure to drag on the battle for one of Hollywood’s most iconic studios, a fight which has already stretched out for months.
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Netflix’s proposed deal has already raised antitrust questions, as it would combine two of the most popular streaming platforms into one. Additionally, President Donald Trump has said the deal “could be a problem” because of the size of the combined companies’ market share.
A deal between WBD and Paramount would also likely raise similar concerns.
Netflix agreed to pay WBD $5.8 billion if the deal doesn’t go through. WBD would have to pay Netflix $2.8 billion if the deal collapses.
Netflix did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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IBM is buying data infrastructure company Confluent for $11 billion in cash in a bid to bolster its data and automation products as ever more companies move their tech operations to the cloud and deploy AI technology.
The tech giant said it would offer $31 for each Confluent share, which is about 50% more than what the smaller company’s shares closed at on Friday, before news of the deal.
Confluent offers a platform that helps enterprises manage streams of data in real time, a use case that’s exploded in demand as ever more companies develop and deploy AI products, which require significant back-and-forth processing of data for inferencing.
IBM said Confluent will complement its existing data and automation products, as well as improve upon its existing offerings across AI, automation, data, and consulting. The company expects the deal to add to EBITDA and free cash flow in the two years after the deal is closed.
This is the latest in a string of deals IBM has struck in recent months as it seeks to capitalize on the AI boom, though at $11 billion, Confluent would be the tech giant’s largest buy in years, following its acquisition of HashiCorp in 2024.
IBM in October signed a deal with AI lab Anthropic to deploy the Claude large language model into some of its products; it has partnered with AMD to develop a new computing architecture that combines quantum systems with AI-specialized chips; and it acquired data analysis startup Seek AI in June.
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Limitless, the AI startup formerly known as Rewind, has been acquired by Meta, the company announced Friday on its website. The company, which made an AI-powered pendant to record your conversations, says it will no longer sell its hardware devices and will maintain support for its existing customers for a year.
Customers will no longer have to pay a subscription fee and will be moved to the Unlimited Plan for the time being. Other functionality will be wound down, including its non-pendant software “Rewind,” which recorded users’ desktop activity and turned it into a searchable record.
The startup, founded by Brett Bejcek and Dan Siroker, the co-founder and former chief executive of Optimizely, pivoted to become an AI device maker last year, offering its Limitless pendant for $99. The wearable could attach to your shirt like a wireless mic or be worn like a necklace. The device is one of several AI hardware devices on the market, including another (not very well-received) AI pendant known as Friend.
According to Limitless’ announcement, the company shares in Meta’s vision to “bring personal superintelligence to everyone,” which includes building AI-enabled wearables. (Meta is focused for now on AR/AI glasses, like its Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta, and its in-lens AI glasses, the Meta Ray-Ban Display.) Limitless said it will help bring that vision to life — which likely means supporting Meta’s existing products, not helping Meta add an AI pendant to its lineup.
The company hinted that the increased competition in the market made it difficult for it to compete, especially as the larger players like OpenAI and Meta are developing their own hardware devices, too.
“When we started Limitless five years ago, the world was very different,” wrote Siroker in the announcement. “AI was a pipe dream to many. Hardware startups were considered unfundable, and a business that did both AI and hardware would have been considered ludicrous. But today is different. The world has changed. We’re no longer working on a weird fringe idea. We’re building a future that now seems inevitable. We’re not alone.”
Meta shared the following statement with TechCrunch via email: “We’re excited that Limitless will be joining Meta to help accelerate our work to build AI-enabled wearables.” The tech giant didn’t share further information about its plans, beyond noting that the team will work in the wearables organization of Reality Labs.
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Limitless will offer its customers a way to export their data, the company said, or users can choose to delete their data from within the app.
The startup had raised more than $33 million in funding from investors, including a16z, First Round Capital, and NEA.
Updated after publication with Meta’s comment.
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