Tuesday, October 20, 2026
Paramount completed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery on Tuesday, renaming the combined company Skydance and claiming more than 200 million streaming subscribers. It starts life with about $80 billion of debt after raising $52 billion in loans and bonds in a single week.
Paramount Skydance priced $41.4 billion of secured notes on Wednesday to pay for Warner Bros. Discovery. On Thursday some of the new bonds traded at about 96 cents on the dollar, its existing bonds fell sharply and the cost of insuring its debt reached a 17-year high, Bloomberg reported. The deal is due to close on Tuesday, and the combined company will be called Skydance.
National CineMedia has closed its $275 million purchase of Captivate, the elevator-screen network in office and apartment buildings, giving it more than 48,000 screens outside the home. It paid with a new $275 million term loan. On Monday the whole company was worth about $211 million.
Paramount Skydance has settled the antitrust suit twelve states brought against its $110 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery. The remedies are promises about behaviour: thirty films a year in cinemas, with $30 million owed for each one short. The number that explains the timing is a different one. From 1 October, every day the deal stays open costs Paramount about $7 million.
The Justice Department has issued Nvidia a formal demand for information over its licensing arrangement with Groq, in which Groq's chief executive and chief operating officer moved across. The question is whether a licence plus a mass talent transfer is an acquisition that should have been reported. It is the first formal test of a structure the whole industry has been using.
Private capital has spent three years buying HVAC, plumbing and electrical contractors at multiples the trades have never seen. The thesis is sound, the integration is harder than the model assumed, and the second wave is arriving at higher prices.