Why Barry Diller's IAC is interested in Paramount

Billionaire Barry Diller is exploring a bid to take over Paramount. And joining us right now to talk more about it is Rich Greenfield. He's with light Shed Partners, of course. Rich, I like what you tweeted today or what you posted on X. You said that basically every one of the vultures is coming out to take a look at this. How, how many people are kicking the tires? I don't know, Becky, But I mean, think about it, you know, think about how many people try to buy sports teams in America. You know, it is these are vanity assets. And if you think about Paramount, sure, media has lots of problems that you can't fix what's happening in broadcast and cable, network television in the shift to streaming. But you know what? Getting a studio, you know, there's not many studio lots in the world. There's only, you know, a few of them. And Paramount's available and for somewhere between 1 1/2 and $3 billion. Effectively, if you buy National Amusement Stake from the Redstone family, you effectively control Paramount. So whether it's a large minority stake in National Amusements where you get a seat at the table or whether it's full control for two and a half $3 billion. This is exactly what we thought the Redstone family was going to do is when they killed the Skydance deal, they were going to open up to anyone else that wanted to just buy their stake versus the far more complicated transaction of buying all of Paramount. I love your point that this is cheaper than any of these sports teams that we've been talking about. You can get control of the studio, this iconic studio, for less than you would be paying for one of these sports teams that we're talking about. Four to $5 billion at this point. Barry Diller, obviously, he's somebody who has a long and rich history, not only with Paramount but with Hollywood and understanding what people want. How likely is that bid? How do you see this happening? Look, you've seen Diller and IAC get sort of opportunistically involved in many assets over the years, most recently sports betting when they took an opportunity when sort of, you know, the price got to an interesting point for them. I don't know. I mean, look, Diller has been on CNBC, Becky, you may have even done these interviews. He's crapped all over the legacy media sector. He basically has declared Netflix quote, UN quote the winner. I have no idea how serious or not. I I do know that IAC has repeatedly looked at, you know, sort of opportunities. And look, the the thing that we should be talking about is what happened last week in the debate. Forget about your political views. There's clearly greater likelihood of a Trump presidency after last week. If Trump is president, the regulatory or the hostile or chilling regulatory environment that we've been operating under would lift. And there are a lot of possibilities for Paramount. You know, so if you control Paramount, what could you do with all of those assets? I think there's a lot more possibilities under Trump than we currently have under Biden. And so that could also be why people like Diller have all of a sudden shown interest. So if you've got Barry Diller, we've heard Warner Brothers. Who else do you think might be circling? Who else would this? I mean, we heard Edgar Bronfman, Junior and Bain. Sure. You know, there's been speculation out there that Bobby Kodak might have interest, you know, former Activision. Like there are a lot of people and I'm sure there's billionaires that we don't even know that are showing interest in this. Again, you know, somewhere full full control, meaning full ownership of national means is probably a $3 billion check. But if you want to actually own 49% and maybe have a path to control, you could do that very quickly, probably for a billion and a half dollars. And there's a lot of people, Becky, that could write that type of check if they wanted to take control.