Netflix Reportedly Greased the Skids for Its Warner Acquisition by Yukking It Up with Trump

The main subtext of the unpleasant announcement on Thursday that Netflix planned to buy Warner Bros. Discovery in a deal worth $82.7 billion was that Silicon Valley is still grabbing all it can amid the ongoing looting of culture by Big Tech. That subtext may have overshadowed some additional, equally nauseating subtext that anonymous sources have confirmed to Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw: that if it succeeds, it will likely be in part the product of a personal lobbying effort aimed at winning President Donald Trump’s approval.

That push reportedly included Netflix leadership visiting the White House for a meeting with Trump that lasted for hours, but only after a chummy dinner at Mar-a-Lago almost a year earlier.

To refresh your memory, Netflix is buying a vast cache of cultural properties on top of the streaming infrastructure at Warner Bros. Discovery, including HBO Max. Just for starters, it locks down four of the most oft-cited “best movies of all time,” Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Blade Runner, and Gone with the Wind. Same goes for TV. Netflix will now own The Sopranos, The Wire, and my personal favorite media property in existence: Curb Your Enthusiasm.

By absorbing the very best of legacy showbiz, Netflix has seemingly no lands left to conquer without becoming such an obvious monopoly that no presidential administration could possibly tolerate it. And Trump is historically more of a monopoly hawk than previous Republican presidents. So such meetings, grubby or not, were probably inevitable.

According to Bloomberg’s reporting, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos sat down with Trump at the White House in mid-November to gently broach this, and make his company’s case, and during the meeting Trump is said to have told Sarandos that Warner Bros. ought to go to the highest bidder—which must have been music to Sarandos’ ears. Apparently Sarandos claimed at the time that Netflix ranked 5th or 6th on the list of biggest TV distributors, and that with this deal, it would become as big as YouTube.

But apparently Sarandos had set the stage for the success of this conversation almost exactly a year ago, at a December 2024 Mar-a-Lago dinner—just after Trump won the presidential election, in other words. That was when Silicon Valley leaders like Mark Zuckerberg were trekking to Florida to kiss Trump’s ring before he was sworn in.

Sarandos, Shaw writes, “had deep ties with the Obama and Biden administrations” because he’s married to Nicole Avant, who was Obama’s ambassador to the Bahamas. It’s mainly in this Obama-centric context that Sarandos had schmoozed with global power players, so in his view he needed to fix that. Per Shaw, “the two traded stories and struck up a bond over their childhoods and their shared love of entertainment.” And Trump and Sarandos still chat, apparently.