My report two weeks ago on Shari Redstone’s talks with David Ellison’s Skydance and RedBird Capital seems to have sparked a feeding frenzy on Paramount Global and its parent, National Amusements, Inc. One or both of these companies almost certainly will be sold/merged in 2024, but it’s probably not worth getting especially worked up (yet!) about the Warner Bros. Discovery talks, first reported yesterday by Axios. I confirmed that a long meeting did take place between WBD’s David Zaslav and Paramount’s Bob Bakish. But Bakish can put on a little top hat and hawk his assets like a sidewalk salesman to anyone and everyone, the only thing that matters here is whether a deal passes the Shari test.

Redstone controls nearly 80 percent of Paramount voting stock via NAI, and every indication is that she’s not gonna bless a deal that sends her to Siberia—or at least sends her to Siberia without the billions she believes the company is actually worth. And she believes it’s worth a lot more than the $10 billion market cap and $15 billion in debt. When Zaslav, his C.F.O. Gunnar Wiedenfels, and the bankers at Allen & Co. get under the Paramount hood, as is expected in the coming weeks, let’s see how much they think it’s all worth. Then the task will be for Bakish to sell Shari on this or another deal, all while Shari carries on her own talks for NAI. Shari and Bob can hopefully use all this bluster to lure other bidders, notably Brian Roberts at Comcast, who took a hard look at both Fox and MGM before they ultimately sold to Disney and Amazon, respectively.