The Standard General hedge fund co-founder Soo Kim has held talks over buying into Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD)’s TV networks, according to the Financial Times.
Citing people briefed on the matter, the article reported that Kim had been approached by “at least one” WBD shareholder about acquiring some or all of the cable TV assets, which include CNN and the T-Nets. The identity of the shareholder was not revealed.
Kim leads Standard General, a hedge fund that is the biggest shareholder in gambling and interactive firm Bally’s Corporation and owns MediaCo, a Burbank-based TV and radio business catering for African-Americans and Hispanic Americans. His company also came close to an $8.6B deal for station owner Tegna, but the deal was scrapped after regulatory problems in 2023.
We’ve reached out to WBD for comment. Standard General couldn’t be contacted before press time.
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The news comes as WBD’s future remains up in the air. Overnight, WBD urged its shareholders to reject Paramount Skydance’s hostile $108B offer for all of its assets, and is moving ahead with an $82.7B total enterprise agreement with Netflix – a deal that does not include the TV networks. WBD President and CEO Davdi Zaslav yesterday took Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters on a tour of the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank.
While the studio, streaming service HBO Max and affiliated cable channel HBO are broadly considered the jewels in the WBD crow, the TV networks have been dubbed – perhaps unfairly – ‘CrapCo’ in some circles. While they still deliver bundles of cash, they are seeing their value rapidly decreasing as TV advertising drops and cord cutting continues. Paramount’s all-cash offer for WBD values them at just $1 a share.
Should Netflix complete its deal, the plan is for the networks and the Warner Bros. International Television Production wing to spin-off on their own. These would be the assets Kim would buy, should a deal emerge.