California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday he did not pressure state Attorney General Rob Bonta into settling an antitrust lawsuit against Paramount Skydance Corp., after Bonta’s abrupt reversal cleared a path for the company’s $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery Inc.
Bonta had led a coalition of state attorneys general suing to block the deal, which was originally expected to close in the third quarter of this year. On Monday, Paramount announced a settlement had been reached with Bonta’s office, effectively removing the legal obstacle to the merger.
The reversal drew immediate suspicion after reports surfaced that Paramount CEO David Ellison had considered relocating the company’s headquarters out of California if the deal fell through. Critics accused Newsom and Bonta of folding under that threat.
Newsom rejected that characterization directly.
“I didn’t pressure anybody,” Newsom told Axios’ Alex Thompson. “I made the point. I’ve made it very publicly and consistently and been reported maybe two or three hundred different ways that we, me, many folks, including the mayor, soon-to-be governor-elect [Xavier] Becerra and others, preferred, in the words of Rob Bonta himself, that he focus on getting this done at the boardroom, not the courtroom.”
“And the minute that Rob said that on CNBC, we amplified that, said this was a better approach. That was the framework, and he worked hard to deliver for California, and I think he did,” Newsom continued.
Bonta, for his part, insisted at a Monday press conference that settling was not an endorsement of the merger itself.
“This settlement is not a vote of support for this merger; it is not a blessing of the broader merger,” Bonta said. “I am always willing to come to the table for honest, good-faith negotiations, and when we can find a strong solution that protects competition and consumers, I’d rather resolve the case, the issue, in the boardroom instead of the courtroom. That’s what happened here.”
Fox News Digital reached out to both Newsom’s and Bonta’s offices for comment and did not receive a response.
Media Research Center Business associate editor Joseph Vazquez was blunter about what he sees as the real motive behind the about-face.
“It’s all left-wing virtue-signaling until economic reality slaps you in the face,” Vazquez told Fox News Digital. “Governor Gavin Newsom knows that he’s essentially turned his state into a pariah for business, and Attorney General Bonta’s Marxist legal vendetta against the bourgeoisie involved in the Paramount/Warner deal was a perfect example of that. It was good antitrust fodder for the radical left for a time, until push came to shove.”
Vazquez argued the political stakes were too high to let a media giant walk away from Los Angeles heading into a midterm year.
“The last thing the Democrats — or Newsom, for that matter — need at this point in a midterm election season is for a punitive tax hell like California to be pinned as the reason a multibillion-dollar media giant like Paramount eventually flees Los Angeles for a more business-friendly, Republican state like Tennessee or Texas,” he said, “regardless of whether the merger risks another hole in an already-thinning left-wing media firewall or not.”
Not everyone on the left was satisfied with the outcome. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., had urged Bonta against settling and slammed the deal once it was announced.
“Allowing one Trump-aligned, foreign-owned conglomerate to dominate American news and entertainment is a disastrous outcome,” Warren said. “After the Trump administration ran an apparently corrupt antitrust review process to wave through a blatantly illegal merger, this settlement greenlights an anti-monopoly disaster that will result in higher prices and fewer jobs, and enables a handful of billionaires to call the shots in the American media.”
Warren added that corporate promises made to close a deal rarely hold up. “Corporate executives for aspiring monopolies are always quick to offer unenforceable promises to close a deal, but it is workers and consumers who ultimately pay the price,” she said. “The new Paramount behemoth is a clear candidate for antitrust scrutiny in a future pro-competition Administration.”
