David Ellison won the battle for Warner Bros., but the war is just beginning.
Ellison and his co-CEO Ynon Kreiz must get through the wolves of Wall Street to make the finances of smashing together two studios in an eye-popping $110 billion acquisition work.
And they’re off to a rough start.
In order to fund the deal, Ellison and co. had to raise money through various sources, including around $24 billion from Middle Eastern sovereign funds, a few more billion from RedBird Capital and the Ellison family chipping in. The company is also raising $42.4 billion from the bond market.
But Skydance has certain financial targets it promised its debt holders — the first one being in 2028. It’s not a specific amount, but rather a ratio of its debt compared to its earnings.
Naveen Sarma, sector lead for U.S. media and telecom at S&P Global, doesn’t believe Skydance can hit its target in 2028. “There’s a gap they’re going to have to bridge,” Sarma says, believing they’ll have to cover anywhere between $10 billion and $15 billion to bridge that gap. “How much of that comes from an additional equity infusion from [David’s dad] Larry Ellison?”
Much of the attention has been paid to the elder Ellison and his $180 billion-ish net worth. (Though much of that is tied to Oracle’s stock, and his ability to backstop the company going forward.)
Adding to the financial load, the antitrust lawsuit from California Attorney General Rob Bonta and the WGA delayed the merger’s closing months. During that time, the cost of borrowing money (i.e. interest rates) went up as did Treasury yields. All told, Paramount will have to pay up to an additional $500 million per year due to the spike in borrowing costs, per Bloomberg estimates.
“It just means a deeper hole for them to dig out of,” Sarma tells Page Six Hollywood. “There’s going to be a challenge to de-lever anyway, it just makes it more of a challenge.”
In plain English, “de-leveraging” means paying down debt. And with so much of it on the books, Skydance isn’t expected to generate positive cash flow — meaning it brings in more cash than it spends — until 2028 at the earliest.
The company also has around $6 billion in synergies — the amount of operating costs it has promised to cut, which typically involves layoffs — but Ellison has promised other ways of reducing costs that don’t involve laying off thousands of employees. (Though to be clear, hefty layoffs are still expected.)
Since CEO David Ellison promised Bonta 30 movies a year and increased spending on content, there are fewer ways to reduce debt than is typical in prior big mergers.
Meanwhile, investors in the bonds were sitting on more than $100 million in paper losses on just the first day of trading.
Much of the angst surrounding the deal has focused on the ramifications for Hollywood’s creative community. But Wall Street has been fretting about the math.
After all, investors don’t care about winning Oscars. They just don’t want to lose money.