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It’s the intrigue of the hour in Hollywood, and the implications are real for the U.S. entertainment and news industries: Who will win the bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery $WBD, which includes HBO and CNN: Larry and David Ellison’s Trump-aligned Paramount Skydance $PSKY with its Saudi-backed and Jared-Kushner-managed bid, or Netflix $NFLX, the streaming giant that’s got a production deal with Barack and Michelle Obama?

Last week’s $72 billion Netflix megabid for the stumbling WBD media empire was not the end of the matter (as BBTW and Porky Pig suggested last week). Now mogul David Ellison (son of Oracle’s $ORCL Larry Ellison) is leading with a $108 billion hostile bid for the whole WBD package, including the broadcast unit and CNN, which WBD’s board earlier said was going to be spun off into a separate company.

Hollywood is rooting for Netflix, both for money and politics. “I’m ecstatic about anything that keeps WB out of the clutches of the MAGAsphere, which is where Paramount resides,” one prominent Hollywood agent told BBTW without wishing to be named. “At least Netflix is run by sane people. I doubt they’re going to dismantle Warner Bros films, WBTV, or any of WB’s other excellent and time-honored divisions.”

As the agent who didn’t want to ruin his lunch hour, noted, a Paramount-WB studio merger would stifle competition — and paychecks — for talent, but Netflix acquiring Warner Bros. will just speed up Hollywood’s inevitable move away from in-theater movie releases. “The worst that happens is shorter feature release windows in theaters, and that’s the way the film industry is going in any event.”

The last two big studio mergers didn’t turn out well for Hollywood: Disney’s $DIS purchase of 20th Century Fox from the Murdochs saw it effectively stop making films, and Amazon’s $AMZN 2022 purchase of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer stifled the lion’s roar, effectively turning MGM into a film library.

Beyond Hollywood, there’s deep concern about the outsize role of three Gulf Arab state investment funds, including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, in the Paramount bid. They have committed $24 billion to Paramount’s bid (Paramount’s market cap is just $15.4 billion). Saudi’s PIF also funds Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners. Paramount has told the SEC that the Gulf funds would give up any voting rights, but as the largest equity investors, they’d still carry weight.

A major concern is the effect combining CBS and CNN would have on the independence of the U.S. media, where politically active right-leaning media companies like Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch’s Fox $NWSA have outsized influence. Trump said on Sunday that he would “be involved” in the sale decision.

“What I think [Ellison] has in mind is to effectively challenge the Murdoch operation so there would be two giant [media] corporations in competition with each other,” Marvin Kalb, the founding director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, told BBTW. “Politically, that presents a huge problem for [the U.S.], because Trump already has the support of the Fox operation, and if he also then has CBS and CNN, he would be in the position of a dictator having effective control over media from top to bottom.”

In a normal merger of this size and with its outsized influence on American society, regulators would scrutinize the proposals and might even scupper both deals in favor of WBD’s split into two public companies. But under a Trump administration, regulators are bending to the Administration’s will, said Reuben Miller, the chief regulatory analyst at Dealreporter. Even a national security review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. will likely be a breeze, said Miller. “With Kushner’s Affinity Partners’ involvement, it’s basically a get-out-of-jail-free card for the CFIUS process,” Miller said. “There’s been a number of mergers in the last year where the chief of the antitrust division, Abigail Slater, has been overruled by senior officials at the Department of Justice and White House officials.”

More likely, he said, Netflix may be investigated for having too big a slice of the streaming market when it acquires Warner Bros’ catalogue and HBO.

—Peter S. Green

• What’s a chip worth? That’s one of the biggest questions and major concerns fueling worries about an AI bubble. Or more precisely, just how long will an AI chip last before the next generation chip puts it on the shelf? Moore’s law still seems to rule, and that has investors worried. If Nvidia $NVDA ( ▼ 1.55% ) chips become obsolete in less than three years, as many suspect they will, that could crash the value of AI farms, where investors are betting their expensive chips will last as long as six years. But if they don’t, and new billions are needed for buying the latest chip, the current financing model could collapse, along with the profits of AI firms, which will have to double the cash they spend on new equipment. 
• Shoulda seen it coming: Shares in Larry Ellison’s Oracle $ORCL ( ▼ 10.83% ) plummeted 14% by midday Thursday as its plans for vast AI spending came in way above Wall Street’s estimates and its revenue came in well below. Even as profits grew with per-share earnings of $2.26 blasting past Wall Street’s $1.64 estimate, the problem is the high spending (planned AI outlays on its new data centers jumped from $35 billion for 2026 to $50 billion) and the fact that most of its revenue comes from contracts for services that will take years to be delivered and paid for. Shares are down about 40% from their September peak, just after announcing a vast deal with OpenAI, even as the Magnificent Seven tech stocks have climbed 10%. Ellison owns about 41% of Oracle, and his own net worth has been on a rollercoaster ride alongside the stock, jumping from around $150 billion in early 2025, to $238 billion on Thursday, but briefly cracking $400 billion and besting Elon Musk as the world’s richest man for a day, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index shows. Meanwhile, the stock market continues to rise, as the Fed rate cut and the AI boom boost spending.
• Palantir sub contracting: The U.S. The Navy is handing over the management of its submarine repair and building pipeline to Peter Thiel’s Palantir, and its CEO, Alex Karp. The $440 million contract would save about 20,000 man hours a year, the company said (that’s about 10 full-time employees worth). More importantly it aims to prevent bottlenecks that delay sub repairs by years. 
• Soft dreams are made of these: Masayoshi Son, the Japanese investor who runs the quixotic Softbank $SFTBY ( ▼ 0.59% ) investment fund (it made billions on China’s Alibaba, and lost billions on WeWork and the tech stock plunge of 2022-23) says he’s planning to take hundreds of billions of dollars that Japan has kinda-sorta pledged to invest in the U.S., and build a group of Trump-branded industrial parks on Federal land to manufacture AI infrastructure parts. Son says he’ll start building next year, but under the tariff-cutting U.S.-Japan trade deal the money’s a part of, cash won’t start flowing until 2029. Siphoning that cash out of Japan could destabilize the Japanese economy, and would effectively be a low-cost but risky loan to the U.S. In a fascinating analysis, the St. Louis Fed says Japan might be better off tearing up the trade agreement and accepting higher tariffs. 
• The Nvidia nversion: After lobbying by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, President Trump agreed the U.S. based chipmaker could export its H200 chips to China, if it paid a 25% surcharge to the U.S. government, part of Trump’s vision of a booming role for government in the economy. National security hawks (and Chinese tech firms) said the chips could give China a step up in the race for AI supremacy, while Hunag argued the market would be huge. But Beijing has other ideas. It is reportedly planning strict limits on the H200 in a bid to stimulate demand for its own advanced AI-capable chips. Meanwhile, the U.S. Attorney in Houston said this week that the feds had busted a chip-smuggling ring that had sent or tried to send more than $160 million of export-restricted computer chips to China. The chips in question? Nvidia’s H100 and H200 GPUs.
• Details are emerging of another chip transfer: Nexperia, the Dutch company that makes chips for car parts, began working to move research and technology to China when it was bought by Chinese government-backed Wingtech in 2019, the firm’s Dutch former CEO told the New York Times. The Dutch government seized Nexperia in September amid concerns China would cut off the chip supply to European carmakers. 

• Ben & Jerry’s great stock market adventure: Magnum Ice Cream $MAG ( ▼ 0.1% ) , the Unilever $UL ( ▲ 1.5% ) spinoff that holds ice cream makers Ben & Jerry’s, Breyers, and Cornetto (and of course the chocolate-dipped Magnum bar) opened on Amsterdam’s Euronext exchange with a market cap of $9 billion. The company sees its biggest growth in the U.S. where Americans eat about 4 gallons of ice cream a year each, and the market is expected to grow from $79 billion in 2024 to $132 billion by 2032, especially because consumers will be able to offset the effects of eating so many magnums with GLP-1 weight loss drugs by then. Magnum holds about a 20% market share of the ice cream market in the U.S.
• Campbell’s is in the soup: It wasn’t enough for a top Campbell’s Soup $CPB ( ▲ 0.89% ) exec to be ousted last month after he allegedly called the company’s famous canned soups “highly processed food” for “poor people,” that included “bioengineered meat.” (Campbell’s said their meat is not 3-D printed). but tariffs on steel and aluminum used in cans, and on imports from Europe including Rao’s spaghetti sauce had cooled profits, so it’s hiking prices in prime soup season. The company said sales were down 2% from a year earlier in the last quarter, but its share price is down 35% this year.
• Cracker Barrel’s kitchen ills: It’s not just the rebranding controversy that’s killing Cracker Barrel $CBRL ( ▲ 1.0% ) : Food sales at the southern charm roadside rest stops are down 4.7% (retail sales are worse, down 8.5%), and foot traffic at its 660 locations dropped 9% in early November from a year earlier. Customers tell the Wall Street Journal it’s about more than the logo. Cost-cutting programs sapped food quality, they say. “Ingredients and recipes changed,” one customer told the news org. “Same names but different experience.”
• Stellantis’ move-out fee: Carmaker Stellantis $STLA ( ▼ 2.64% ) is on the hook for about $157 million, after moving its Brompton, Ontario plant to the U.S. in response to Trump’s 25% tariff on auto and auto part imports. That’s how much the Ontario government had given Stellantis in aid to retool the factory to make gas-and electric-versions of the Jeep Compass SUV. A Stellantis spokeswoman said the shuttered plant wasn’t shuttered, just undergoing “an operational pause,” and that its 3,000 furloughed employees were still employed by Stellantis. Shares in the carmaker are down about 14% this year, but up nearly 40% from an early-April low. GM $GM ( ▲ 0.06% ) has also halted some production in Canada because of the Trump tariffs and reciprocal Canadian tariffs.

• Two shoppers walk into an Instacart: It sounds like the setup for a dad joke, but it’s just the latest expose of surveillance pricing, a tech-powered technique that adjusts prices for an item based on an individual consumer’s profile. When Consumer Reports and two other groups did a series of tests, sending shoppers to Instacart $CART ( ▲ 2.68% ) to buy the same item in the same store at the same time, (they were linked in a Zoom call), they found some shoppers were charged as much as 23% more than others, with an average difference of 13%. In one instance, a dozen eggs sold for $3.99, $4.28, $4.59, $4.69, and $4.79 on Instacart at a Safeway store in Washington, D.C. Over a year, that could cost the average family $1,200. That’s thrown some shade on surveillance pricing. Instacart’s share price dropped more than 8% following the report’s release, though it’s since recovered a bit.
• Team USA’s own goal? The deal that host cities signed with soccer’s governing body FIFA to hold this year’s world cup at 26 sites in North America World Cup is gearing up to be a financial fiasco. Facing a collective funding shortfall of about $250 million, their contracts with FIFA bar them from doing what most host cities do - turn to local merchants for sponsorship. The merchants get to promote their brands and the cities get cash to cover the cost of putting on the tournament. But according to U.K. newspaper The Independent, cities can’t sign sponsorship deals with local business that might be in the same line of business as the Cup’s main sponsors, who include McDonald’s (Philly’s bid for a WaWa sponsorship was nixed), Bank of America (no local banks), Anheuser-Busch (no local breweries) and Coke (no other soft drinks). And that’s not all. Egypt and Iran, two Middle East nations that target gays and lesbians, have also complained to FIFA over a World Cup soccer match in Seattle that is planned to celebrate LGBTQ+ Pride. As the Associated Press reports, FIFA risks being accused of a double standard if it sides with World Cup teams’ federations over the city of Seattle. In 2022, at the World Cup in Qatar, FIFA fiercely defended the right of the host nation’s cultural norms to be respected in full by visiting teams, (a.k.a no Pride flags) although notably, Qatar’s scoring the World Cup was dogged by allegations of bribery. Neither Egypt or Iran have vied to host the tournament themselves, or bought the American President an airplane recently. So they might have to suck it up.

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• About that Space Race. First, it was comms satellites (Starlink versus Project Kuiper a.k.a. Leo), then moon shots (SpaceX v. Blue Moon), and now Musk and Amazon $AMZN ( ▼ 0.65% ) boss Jeff Bezos are dueling over orbital AI data centers. The advantage of putting AI centers in space? There’s no issue cooling off the GPUs, and free solar energy removes one barrier to Earthly expansion. But the disadvantages? Pretty much everything, from hosting the payloads into orbit or making repairs to getting the data up to the heavens and back without any lag time. Google $GOOGL ( ▼ 2.43% ) is planning its own orbital AI data center test in 2027. 
• Whether or not it puts AI data centers  into orbit, SpaceX still thinks it’s got a bright future. It’s considering an IPO next year after a capital raise that could value the rocket shop at $800 billion, making it the most valuable private company in the U.S. In July, a secondary share sale valued SpaceX at $400 billion. That’s even as the company has suffered a series of launch pad and midair explosions, prompting NASA to award some moon landing contracts to rival Blue Origin. Musk has a 40% stake in SpaceX, but the new raise could cut that percentage.

Now that the Fed has come through with another quarter-percentage rate cut, the big question is: What happens next? Will mortgage rates fall? Will inflation stay tamed? Will hiring pick up? BBTW asked EY-Parthenon Chief Economist Gregory Daco for his take on how the Fed rate cuts will affect consumers:

Daco: The main message is that a single rate cut helps, but it works slowly and its effect is limited. Mortgage rates may edge lower, but only gradually, because they depend more on longer-term market yields than on the Fed’s policy rate. At present the yield curve is steepening because of higher inflation, a concerning debt trajectory, optimism around AI driven growth and concerns about political influence on the Fed.

Cheaper credit gives firms a bit more breathing room, especially on refinancing, but it is unlikely to trigger a hiring surge. With demand cooling and uncertainty still elevated, most companies will remain cautious.

Lower interest costs provide only a small offset. Tariff-related price pressures come from supply constraints, so monetary policy cannot undo them. That is why our core inflation view remains close to 3% through H1 2026.

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LYNGBY, Denmark (AP) — It was a wedding that captivated the world — in 1981, Lady Diana Spencer said “I will” to Prince Charles, becoming Princess of Wales and bringing youth and glamour to Britain’s royal family.

More than 40 years after the wedding and many years after the marriage fell apart, royal fans had the chance to buy a rare part of that historic day — or perhaps a sip of it — during an auction Thursday. But the exclusive magnum of Dom Pérignon Vintage 1961 champagne was ultimately not sold because the bids were not high enough.

The champagne, specially produced for the occasion, was expected to fetch up to 600,000 Danish kroner (around 81,000 euros or $93,000) when it went under the hammer Thursday at Bruun Rasmussen’s auction house in Lyngby, north of Copenhagen.

“The bids did not reach the desired minimum price, and therefore it was unfortunately not sold,” auction house spokesperson Kirstine Dam Frihed said in an email Thursday. “We had of course hoped that it would sell at the estimated value, especially considering the great public interest it received.”

Prince Charles, now King Charles III, married Lady Diana Spencer in London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral on July 29, 1981. The ceremony was followed by a lavish reception at Buckingham Palace.

Charles and Diana separated in 1992 and divorced in 1996. A year later, she and companion Dodi Fayed died in a high-speed car crash in Paris.

The champagne was a limited-edition wedding release, created to celebrate the union.

A unique label reads: “Specially shipped to honor the marriage of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer. 29 July 1981.”

“It’s really, really rare and a bottle with that royal provenance,” Thomas Rosendahl, head of the auction house’s wine department, said in a recent interview with The Associated Press ahead of the auction.

Rosendahl said only 12 were made and were intended to be opened on the day. It’s not known what happened to the others, perhaps gifted to guests.

“It was a celebration from Dom Pérignon to the wedding,” Rosendahl said.

“They also got … normal bottles that were served at the wedding, but these bottles were just forgotten or kept away.”

Little was revealed about the seller. Rosendahl only said that it’s a Danish collector who previously purchased the bottle from a London wine merchant.

Rosendahl said that he’s been contacted by “a lot of wine collectors” asking about the magnum, its provenance, and how it was stored. And tests suggest it’s still drinkable.

Henrik Smidt, who is the fine wine manager at Danish wine merchant Kjaer and Sommerfeldt in Copenhagen, said beforehand that he expected the magnum to achieve a high price.

“You have the combination of one of the most famous weddings ever, Lady Diana and Prince Charles. A Dom Pérignon, one of the most famous brands in the world from a very rare vintage,” Smidt said. “All wine connoisseurs, all wine collectors would love to have Dom Pérignon in their cellar.”

“My guess is that it will not be a wine connoisseur who will buy this bottle of wine, more likely a collector of royal artifacts or even potentially a museum,” he said.

NEW YORK (AP) — Most U.S. stocks are rising on Thursday, but a sell-off for Oracle is weighing on Wall Street as investors question whether its big spending on artificial-intelligence technology will pay off.

The S&P 500 was mostly unchanged and hovering around its all-time high, which was set in October. Drops for AI-related stocks dragged the Nasdaq composite down 0.6%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was on track for a record with a gain of 625 points, or 1.3%, as of 1:05 p.m. Eastern time.

Oracle tumbled 13.4% and had briefly been on track for its worst day since 2001, when the dot-com bubble was still deflating. It reported 14% growth in revenue for the latest quarter, which came up just short of analysts’ expectations, even though its profit topped forecasts.

Doubts remain about whether all the spending that Oracle is doing on AI technology will produce the payoff of increased profits and productivity that proponents are promising. Analysts said they were surprised by how much Oracle may spend on AI investments this fiscal year, and questions continue about how the company will pay for it.

Such doubts are weighing on the AI industry broadly, even as many billions of dollars continue to flow in. Those questions had helped drag the broad U.S. stock market through some sharp and scary swings last month.

Nvidia, the chip company that’s become the poster child of the AI boom and is raking in close to $20 billion each month, fell 2.8% Thursday. It was the single heaviest weight on the S&P 500.

Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison said it will continue to buy chips from Nvidia, but it’s now taking a policy of “chip neutrality,” where it will use “whatever chips our customers want to buy. There are going to be a lot of changes in AI technology over the next few years and we must remain agile in response to those changes.”

Even with the struggles for AI-related companies, most of the U.S. market rose Thursday, including three out of every four stocks in the S&P 500.

Eli Lilly helped lead the way and climbed 2.6% after announcing encouraging results from a clinical trial for adult patients who are obese or overweight and have knee osteoarthritis, without diabetes.

The Walt Disney Co. added 1.4% after OpenAI said the entertainment giant is investing $1 billion in it. It’s part of a three-year agreement that will also allow OpenAI to use more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars characters to generate short, user-prompted social videos.

Planet Labs PBC soared 36.7% after the provider of satellite images used by governments and businesses reported stronger results for the latest quarter than analysts expected.

On the losing end of Wall Street, Oxford Industries tumbled 20.8% after the company behind Tommy Bahama and Lilly Pulitzer pointed to how its customers have been seeking out deals and are “highly value-driven.” CEO Tom Chubb said the start of the holiday shopping season has been weaker than the company expected, and it cut its forecast for revenue for the full year.

Vera Bradley, meanwhile, dropped 22.3% after reporting a larger loss for the latest quarter than expected.

In the bond market, Treasury yields slipped after a report said the number of U.S. workers applying for unemployment benefits jumped last week by more than economists expected. That’s a potential indication of rising layoffs and could encourage the Federal Reserve to keep cutting interest rates to bolster the job market.

A day earlier, yields fell after the Fed cut its main interest rate for the third time this year and indicated another cut may be ahead in 2026. Wall Street loves lower interest rates because they can boost the economy and send prices for investments higher, even if they potentially make inflation worse.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury slipped to 4.12% from 4.13% on Wednesday and from 4.18% on Tuesday.

In stock markets abroad, indexes ticked higher in Europe after falling in much of Asia.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 index sank 0.9%, hurt by a sharp drop for SoftBank Group Corp., which is a major investor in AI.

___

AP Writers Teresa Cerojano and Matt Ott contributed.

Last week, I treated myself to a “Bill & Ted” movie marathon. The first two films are a delight, but the third… not so much. “Bill & Ted: Face the Music” picks up 30 years later, and undoes the satisfying conclusion of the previous movie to reset so that the series can continue.

But that’s not where the franchise ends. Well, it is, but not really. Alex Winters and Keanu Reeves, the titular Bill & Ted, currently star in “Waiting for Godot” on Broadway, and it scratches the itch that “Face the Music” failed to. Instead of arbitrarily continuing a story just because it’s valuable intellectual property, I got to see the actors inhabit a similar dynamic, but with a new tone and, well not new, but a different story. It reminded me that a sequel isn’t necessarily the answer to people’s demands for more. This is something Hollywood knew but forgot.

When “Sleepless In Seattle” was a huge hit, people wanted more. Smartly though, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan didn’t make a sequel. Instead, they made “You’ve Got Mail.” It was another rom com starring them, but they played new characters in a, well not new, but different story. It was an even bigger hit.

This wasn’t a play that originated with them, nor Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant who made four movies as romantic interests together, but back in the silent era when Harry Lloyd and Joblyna Ralston teamed up for five films together.

If we don’t want to talk about romantic pairings, let’s look at Paul Newman and Robert Redford. You couldn’t make a “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” sequel without a whole lot of idiocy, but we all loved seeing the duo together again in “The Sting”, and it won Best Picture. It’d be sacrilegious to make “Goodfellas 2,” but “Casino” and “The Irishman” draft off Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci’s history together to deliver the satisfaction of sequels without needing to be one.

As “Devil Wears Prada 2”, “Practical Magic 2”, and “Focker-in-law” march into theaters next year, ask yourself if you actually want to see those stories continue. I don’t, but I’d love to see Anne Hathaway go up against Meryl Streep in another movie.