Far-left TMZ reports Paramount Skydance has officially decided to leave the failed, Democrat-run state of California.
“Internal discussions in the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office and the California Attorney General’s Office were told Paramount would announce it was leaving California, but there’s a twist,” reads the report. “We’re told the Mayor and the A.G. were told the announcement would come yesterday, but it did not happen. We do not know if circumstances changed or if there was just a delay.”
Other news outlets report Paramount is actively looking for 400,000 square feet of office space in the business-friendly, red state of Tennessee, specifically Nashville.
In the past, Paramount chief David Ellison has mentioned Texas, Georgia, and Tennessee as possible landing spots if the former Golden State refuses to agree to a settlement to finalize Paramount’s merger with Warner Bros. Discovery.
The problem is that California Democrat Attorney General Rob Bonta is desperate to block a merger that has been approved everywhere else, and it was approved for good reason. The merger makes sense. If Paramount doesn’t gobble up Warner Bros.
Discovery (WBD), neither Paramount nor WBD will be capable of competing with our tech overlords — Apple, Meta (Facebook), Amazon, Netflix, and Google. Inevitably, though, WBD will be gobbled up by one of those tech overlords, and that will cause more disruption to an already fragile business model and forever alter the entertainment business a whole lot more than one entertainment company merely merging with another.
Don’t forget, the Disney Grooming Syndicate swallowed 20th Century Fox whole without a lawsuit from Rob Bonta. But the Disney Grooming Syndicate is a good dog.
Bonta is a shameless, anti-business, anti-Western, far-left activist who is desperate to stop this merger for only one reason: he doesn’t want Ellison and his CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss making any changes to the far-left, anti-Jewish propaganda outlet commonly known as CNNLOL. In short, Bonta does not want to get in the way of CNNLOL continuing to do this…
If CNN were not a part of WBD, my guess is that this merger would already be approved.
The good news is that Ellison holds all the cards.
He’s justifiably angry that Bonta is doing everything in his power to hurt Paramount, including finding a judge who will not even bother to hear both sides of the antitrust suit until March. Meanwhile (and Bonta and this judge know this), what’s known as a ticking fee begins ticking on October 1. This fee requires Paramount to pay the WBD board $7 million per day until the merger goes through.
The way Ellison looks at it is that a move to Nashville will not only send a message to the state; it will also save him a lot more in taxes than five months of a ticking fee. According to Ellison himself, with combined tax incentives, the fact that Tennessee has no tax on wages, and the overall lower cost of living and doing business, he will save $500 million per year.
Now, try to imagine the annual savings if the merger goes through and Ellison takes WBD to Nashville, which only makes sense.
On the other side, the cost to California will be absolutely devastating for a state already devastated by its dreadful voting habits…
Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of job losses.
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Over $500 million in lost tax revenue.
Some ten to 20 billion annually lost in yearly economic output.
Not to mention all the subsidiary losses to the businesses that count on Paramount’s expenditures.
Then there’s the reputational damage to the state, the message it sends to other corporations, and how it tars Democrats in general and potential presidential candidate Gov. Gavin Newsom specifically as incapable of governing.
The craziest part?
All of this is likely to happen because Rob Bonta is worried a merger might mean CNN tells fewer lies and spreads less misinformation.