Ted Sarandos decided he didn’t need four days to think about it.

On Thursday, the board of Warner Bros. Discovery declared that a revised, higher offer from Paramount-Skydance to acquire all of Warner Bros. Discovery was now “the superior offer.” Meaning the board now favored it over the one they accepted from Netflix back in December, one which covered only WBD’s studios and streaming assets. And that started a clock that gave Netflix four days to respond.

Sarandos and co-CEO Greg Peters released a statement with the clipped, bloodless dignity of men who had already made peace with the outcome. “We’ve always been disciplined,” they said, “and at the price required to match Paramount Skydance’s latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive.”

And just like that, Netflix walked away.

The day before, William D. Cohan of Puck News had delivered his best impersonation of the WOPR computer from “WarGames” and told Ted Sarandos that the only winning move in this particular high-stakes game was not to play.

Cohan, who has covered this deal with the obsessive granularity of a man who genuinely cannot believe what he’s watching, argued in his Wednesday column that the savviest move available to Sarandos was to stand down. “Walk away now and let the desperate boneheads at Paramount Skydance get the Pyrrhic victory on this one,” Cohan wrote. Let them overextend their balance sheet, absorb the debt, fight through the regulatory thicket, and manage the wreckage — then sit back and wait for the sequel.

It was the kind of cold-blooded strategic logic that makes Wall Street veterans nod slowly and say, “That’s about right.”

Sarandos, as it turns out, was already arriving at the same conclusion. As Cohan summarized it, “But the best deals are often the ones you don’t do.”

This represents a remarkable pivot. For months, Cohan had been among the more compelling advocates for Netflix going all-in on WBD — using its extraordinary subscriber base, its global infrastructure, and its cash flow to transform itself from the world’s most powerful streaming platform into something closer to a genuine media empire. Warner Bros. Discovery had the library, the IP, HBO, the studio, and CNN. The logic was clean. The combination was formidable on paper. But the regulatory opposition turned out to be fierce and thoroughly bipartisan. Cohan himself noted in early February that watching the Senate Judiciary Committee take turns hammering the deal was like watching Republicans and Democrats discover they hated something almost as much as they hated each other. Meanwhile, Paramount kept raising its bid with the stubborn persistence of someone who really, really wants this. By Tuesday of this week, the Ellisons had come in with a $31-per-share offer for all of WBD’s assets—the whole thing. Not the cherry-picked studio and streaming assets Netflix had been pursuing — everything.

Sarandos looked at that number and made the only rational decision left to him. Netflix’s stock price had already taken a beating since the WBD deal was first announced in December. And the $2.8 billion break-up fee that Warner Bros. Discovery now owes Netflix — which Paramount graciously offered to cover — is, as consolation prizes go, not nothing.

Call it the mother of all “thanks for playing” consolation prizes.

Then there was the matter of the current President of the United States, who had promised not to be involved and then became very much involved, demanding on his Truth Social platform that Netflix fire board member Susan Rice — a prominent figure in both the Obama and Biden administrations — for having the temerity to criticize on a podcast the very behavior the President then directed squarely at her. If there was a single moment when Ted Sarandos looked at the full picture and decided it was time to walk away from this particular production and wait for the sequel, that may well have been it.

Late on Thursday night, after absorbing all the coverage, we couldn’t stop thinking about another Ted — and the decision he made, which ultimately cost him control of the media empire he built.

When CNN launched in 1980 from Atlanta, it did so on the strength of one man’s sheer audacity and his complete indifference to what the television establishment thought was possible. And now, with an irony that would be too on-the-nose for any screenwriter to invent, Ted Turner’s greatest creation is poised to become part of the company that owns CBS.

Fifteen years after putting CNN on the air, Turner tried to buy CBS in 1995. He wanted it with the hunger of a man who had already built something genuinely new and wanted the crown to go with it. The deal collapsed, partly over regulatory concerns, partly because the CBS board looked at Ted Turner and saw a man whose management style was, putting it charitably, improvisational. Blocked from CBS, Turner turned around and, in 1996, merged Turner Broadcasting — CNN, TBS, TNT, the whole gleaming constellation he had assembled from scratch — into the media behemoth of Time Warner. It seemed at the time like the logical union of complementary powers. Turner became Time Warner’s largest individual shareholder, holding 10% of the company.

Five years later, he would agree to the merger of Time Warner with the darling of the nascent internet, America Online (AOL). Turner would later call this decision his biggest regret in business — his own words, delivered with the rueful clarity of a man who had watched it all slip away in slow motion.

AOL/Time Warner became WarnerMedia, and landed inside AT&T. WarnerMedia became Warner Bros. Discovery under David Zaslav, who spent the subsequent years restructuring, cost-cutting, and shedding talent with the cheerful thoroughness of a moving sale. And Warner Bros. Discovery is now, pending regulatory review, on its way into the arms of a company that owns the very network Turner failed to acquire thirty years ago.

CBS and CNN, together at last — not because of any plan Ted Turner ever made, but because consolidation does what it always does: makes the map smaller until everything eventually touches everything else.

There is no version of this outcome that Turner would have predicted, or endorsed, or probably even imagined possible. He spent his career building an empire on his own terms, and the empire was absorbed, spun off, merged, litigated over, and restructured until his name disappeared from the masthead entirely. Now his most consequential creation is about to be managed by the son of the man who founded Oracle — a fellow who was in elementary school when CNN’s cameras were rolling as the Berlin Wall came down.

We don’t say that as a slight to David Ellison. He played a genuinely difficult hand with considerable persistence. When the moment came, he brought the two things Netflix couldn’t easily match: his father Larry’s financial backing and the political goodwill that comes with it. That, in the end, was the whole game reduced to its essence.

Maybe Ted Sarandos didn’t want to look back someday and reach for the same word Turner did.

Regret.

As any card player knows — if only from the late Kenny Rogers’ most famous song — you got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em.

We’ll wager that Ted Sarandos knows the next line of that song.

too.

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