Earlier this summer, shortly after David Ellison and Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird had signed their deal to acquire Paramount Global, I ran into Aaron Bronfman at a Nantucket dinner party. Amid casual chatter, young Aaron told me that his father, Edgar Bronfman Jr., was gearing up to make a rival bid for Paramount—which has had me scratching my head ever since. Now we know that it was all just a big waste of everyone’s time—from his financial advisors at Perella Weinberg and UBS and Rockefeller Capital Group to his legal advisors at Skadden Arps. The end came late Monday night, when Edgar finally threw in the towel. “It was a privilege to have the opportunity to participate,” he wrote. 

It was also a waste of time for the members of the special committee of Paramount’s board of directors and its advisors, Centerview Partners and Cravath, who gave Bronfman and his team plenty of access to the Paramount privates in pursuit of what might have been a so-called “superior proposal.” Then again, diligently exploring every possible alternative to the Ellison/RedBird deal has likely provided the special committee with some modicum of legal cover as the inevitable shareholder lawsuits against Shari Redstone et al. wend their way into and through the Delaware courts. After all, it’s hard to claim the special committee didn’t take its job seriously. Not only did the committee give the bogus Bronfman bid a wide berth, it also, supposedly, pursued another 50 or so possible alternatives to the Ellison/RedBird offer.