Ellison is keeping a tight lid on his thinking these days.
Page F2From§Eachthe coffee break edition — 11 September 2026
Paramount's CEO boasts tricks up his sleeve to clear a merger California's own attorney general already stalled.
As it ran on the front
Larry Ellison told the New York Post on Thursday that he has "tricks up his sleeve" to get his $110 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery cleared in California. He did not specify which trick. He also did not mention that the state whose sleeve he means to reach into had already told the same paper, eleven days earlier, exactly why the deal was parked there.
On August 30, the Post reported that California Attorney General Rob Bonta's political bid has put the Paramount merger on hold. No trick was named then either. The item simply noted that the review sits with a state officer weighing a campaign, which is one way to describe an antitrust file with a stall built into it.…
…(cont) The filing was not idle everywhere. On August 6, Britain's Competition and Markets Authority cleared the acquisition outright, and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy declined to open a public-interest review after receiving commitments on editorial independence — commitments made, notably, to London, not Sacramento. Whatever tricks a company keeps in reserve for regulators, the ones offered abroad were enough for the desk that received them.
California was not the only place the deal picked up company. On September 1, the Washington Examiner reported that New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport had joined a twelve-state antitrust lawsuit against the merger, led by California, and that New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill was not thrilled about it. Sherrill declined to say whether she backed Davenport's litigation. She praised something else instead — the sentence in the record trails off before naming what.
That is the state of the file as of this week: a merger cleared in London, stalled in Sacramento, multiplied by eleven more attorneys general, and quietly dividing at least one governor from her own AG in New Jersey. Into that file, on September 11, walks the man who wants it closed, promising tricks. The tricks go undescribed. The calendar does not. The hold he means to clear has been sitting exactly where his own bragging point is parked since before he made the brag. How many tricks that takes is a harder number to get than a date. The date is on the record. Ruth just ran it against the filing.
“London cleared this thing outright and got some paper promises on editorial independence for its trouble. Sacramento's still sitting on it, and the guy whose desk it's sitting on is out there running for something else on the side. That's the whole trick, hon — you don't fight the merger, you just let the campaign clock outlast it, and hope nobody notices the merger's the one doing the waiting. Sal continues off the record: eleven states signed on after California, and even the New Jersey governor won't say out loud whether she's with her own attorney general. When the file gets crowded and quiet like that, somebody's counting on it staying that way past election day.”
“Look — Attorney General Bonta reviewing a hundred-ten-billion-dollar merger while also running a campaign, that's just called having a day job, okay? Twelve states signing onto a lawsuit isn't politics, that's due diligence times twelve. Did I say "due diligence"? That's — that's not really the word I meant, forget I said that.”
The receipts
· New Jersey attorney general drives wedge between state leaders over Paramount merger lawsuit from the morgue, 1 Sep 2026
· California AG Rob Bonta’s political bid has put the Paramount merger on hold from the morgue, 30 Aug 2026
· The Competition and Markets Authority of the United Kingdom clears Paramount Skydance's US$110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, while culture secretary Lisa Nandy declines a public-inter from the morgue, 6 Aug 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.