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The Curious Case of Warner’s Eleventh-Hour Bidder

Just as Paramount was finalizing its offer to steal WBD from Netflix, a mysterious Singaporean company suddenly offered to top both bids with $32.50 per share. Was the whole thing a fraud?

David Ellison
The very next day, the WBD board met again, and after hearing all the improvements that PSKY had made, determined that their revised bid might reasonably result in a “superior proposal” after all. If they didn’t at least discuss PSKY’s counter, they might be in breach of their fiduciary duties. The board quickly authorized Zaz to call David Ellison to see if he could sweeten the deal. Photo: Matthew Stockman/Getty Images
William D. Cohan
March 25, 2026

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Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery is proving to be one of those deals that just keeps on giving. Now it turns out that back in February, about a week before David Ellison and David Zaslav announced their merger, a mysterious Singaporean entity called Nobelis Capital, Pte., Ltd., appeared out of nowhere with a $32.50-per-share, all-cash bid for all of WBD. From the jump, there were red flags: The Nobelis bid “did not include any evidence of equity or debt financing, nor a definitive transaction agreement,” according to a revised WBD proxy filed on March 16. What’s more, nobody on Wall Street seemed to have heard of them. And when WBD took the time to try to figure out if they were legit, it came up empty too. “We assumed it wasn’t real based on several factors,” a WBD spokesman told me, before pointing to the recently filed proxy statement.