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Gerry Cardinale Swears He Isn’t Firing Everybody

Paramount’s board member and chief dealmaker insists his $111 billion acquisition of Warner Discovery will make financial sense without the mass layoffs Hollywood fears. But can the cashflow of CBS, a combined streaming platform with 200 million subscribers, and the backing of the Ellisons succeed where past debt-fueled mergers have not?

Gerry Cardinale
Cardinale told Puck that the cash coming from the combined WarnerMount, which will generate a little less than $12 billion in EBITDA this year, will soon rise to $18 billion after $6 billion in cost cuts. Photo: Claudio Villa/AC Milan/Getty Images
Matthew Belloni
March 6, 2026

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Talking to Gerry Cardinale these days, you get equal doses of offense and defense. The RedBird Capital dealmaker and chief architect of Paramount Skydance’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery is simultaneously basking in the biggest media deal of his 30-plus-year career while also kinda feeling the need to explain—and, yes, defend—that same transaction to many jaded skeptics in Hollywood. I’m one of them.