Larry Ellison gives 40 billion personal guarantee to Paramount’s offer

American entertainment giant Paramount announced Monday that the software billionaire Larry EllisonCEO of Paramount by David Ellison father, is personally underwriting a roughly $40.4 billion investment the company is offering as part of its bid for Warner Bros Discovery.

Warner Bros Discovery has tentatively agreed to an $83 billion deal in which it will sell a large portion of its business to Netflix.

However, the bidding process is still ongoing, and the deal requires the approval of the competition authorities.

After the deal, Netflix, the largest streaming service on the market, would also be the owner of HBO and HBO Max, the third largest streaming channel in the industry.

There have been doubts in the market as to whether the competition authorities could, under normal circumstances, accept the creation of such a large market share for Netflix.

Software company Oracle founder Larry Ellison, 81, was on Monday Bloomberg’s billionaire list according to the world’s fifth richest person with a fortune of 246 billion dollars. The guarantee would therefore be relatively large in relation to his wealth.

Warner The Bros board felt Netflix’s offer was better than rival Paramount’s $108 billion offer for the entire company.

This alignment prompted Paramount to make the same offer directly to shareholders.

The board of Warner Bros. then recommended to the shareholders to reject the offer. One of the main reasons for the recommendation was that the offer lacked a personal guarantee from Oracle founder Larry Ellison. In the previous offer, the guarantee would have been provided by the Larry Ellison family foundation.

Paramount is a traditional film studio that owns, among other things, the HBO streaming channel and a number of cable channels.

It would like to buy Warner Bros. in its entirety, so that the transaction would include, among other things, traditional television and online news services owned by Warner, such as the CNN news company and many cable channels.

The main financiers of Paramount’s Warner offer are the ruling families of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi.

Previously, the US president was also included in the offer Donald Trump’s my son-in-law Jared Kushnerin Affinity Partners, but the company later announced it was withdrawing from the investor group.

Kushner has served as a Middle East policy adviser in the Trump administration. Affinity Partners’ funding largely comes from the assets of various investment funds in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi.