What is it that these CEOs think they are seeing, that everyone else is missing? I can believe they have inflated egos, but they’re not totally crazy, right? My impression is that Netflix is fairly sober and results oriented, so I’m confused by the whole thing.
> “We should bear in mind that, in general, it is the object of our newspapers rather to create a sensation — to make a point — than to further the cause of truth.”
Bezos bought the Post for clout. Ellison (and his investors) are buying Warner Brothers first and foremost to make money.
To be fair, sometimes they do. Musk saw genuine bloat at Twitter. I’m doubtful one can optimize that much out of WarnerBrothers. But Hollywood isn’t exactly known for being efficient.
Capital One to lay off more than 1,100 in latest cuts at Discover Financial HQ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270442 - March 2026
This appears to be Larry Ellison trying to manage succession for his kids. We'll probably see a second major acquisition like this for Megan (who tends to be more progressive leaning) [edit: I was right. Megan Ellison is making moves as well now [0]]
Larry would not be able to do something similar at Oracle today (definitely in the 2000s though), as by the 2010s operational control at Oracle increasingly shifted to operators like Catz, Hurd, and Kurian. It also would have led to bad blood à la the Murdochs.
One heir cultivating the right wing (David) and the other heir cultivating the progressive wing (Megan) buys a level of political impunity for the next generation that is hard to come by.
[0] - https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/megan-el...
See the career of Seema Verma from last DT admin.
Linux is just as free (or free-er), and it's a ton better supported: why would these major companies not use it?
Netflix's CDN nodes are basically single-purpose appliances that do one thing: push video bytes to your screen as fast as possible. For that kind of workload FreeBSD's network stack was historically stronger, and the codebase was easier for a small team to reach into and tune aggressively. They've gotten individual servers past 100 Gbps of TLS-encrypted traffic. A lot of the optimizations they needed (kernel TLS offload, sendfile improvements, custom TCP tuning) they built themselves and contributed back to FreeBSD, and the kernel's size and structure made that practical in a way that would've been harder in Linux.
The other piece is licensing. BSD license is permissive, GPL isn't. Netflix wanted the option to make deep kernel modifications without being required to open source everything. They ended up open sourcing a lot of it anyway, but having the choice mattered.
Worth noting they only use FreeBSD for the CDN. All their backend services, recommendations, control plane, that's all Linux on AWS. So it's not that they rejected Linux, they just picked FreeBSD for the one job where it had a real edge.
Once you start meddling with the money machine it's not just Net Profit = Revenue – All Expenses (COGS + Operating Expenses + Interest + Taxes)
WTF is this slop? I've never seen a an article so riddled with analogies and pop culture references that actively degrade the ability to understand whatever argument might be lurking behind the obscurantism.
What body of work has Scott Galloway produced that should cause me or any other reader to suffer this kind of self-indulgence normally found in a 8th grade creative writing class, in the hopes of learning something meaningful about these topics?
Gurus are going to guru I guess.
Whereas I definitely prefer reading PG’s writing over listening to it, interestingly enough.
Just personal preference. Scott’s a good storyteller; if you let him finish the story. :)
Oracle was always an Ellison driven enterprise, but neither David nor Megan had much aptitude or interest in enterprise SaaS, and a newer generation of operators took the reigns at Oracle in the 2010s like Catz, Hurd, Scilia, Magouyrk, and even Kurian before he left for GCP.
Given the ferocity with which this acquisition was fought (much more ferocious that similarly political fraught M&As like Sinclair) and the relatively weak fundamentals, there clearly is an emotional and family succession planning aspect to it.
Ellison has taken similar decisions with an emotional lens previously, such as his support for Steve Jobs retaking control of Apple.
The Skydance-WBD acquisition was extremely messy because emotion was clearly involved.
It remains to be seen whether his rightward turn is just pandering to Trump to get stuff done or if he's gone of the rails. If its the latter, the Paramount acquisition will likely be regarded as one of the biggest failures of all time.
I do not see how Netflix's primary business is any different than the businesses in the "Hollywood" categorization that also pay to make media and then sell it.
Apple and Amazon can be in a different category because making and selling media is an ancillary part of their business. Alphabet does not make or curate any media, it just distributes it.
That would be circular. The author was trying to show how much smaller hollywood media companies are than big tech.
Its like youtube if youtube red didnt fail
Youtube Red just got rebranded as Youtube Premium, and does not seem comparable because Youtube does not curate, it just sells advertising spots, and subscriptions to be able to skip ad breaks. You can watch any random person's content on Youtube or Youtube Premium, but you cannot on Netflix/Disney/etc.
Netflix owns distribution and owns+sells VFX and animation services via Eyeline. Most "Netflix orignals" aren't actually produced by Netflix - Netflix just takes a capital stake in a production that was already in the works by an existing production company.
This made Netflix closer to Valve, and allows their IR team to make a valid case that they should be compared against (and thus deserve a valuation) comparable to other tech companies.
Don't think of this in terms on a financial return on investment. A half dozen people control almost all American media because the fear is that without the manufactured consent, the entire system is going to collapse. Historically, that's tended to result in heads on spikes or being hunt from the city walls.
Perhaps it's nihilistic of me but I thought that after the 2024 election, we're now beyond the point where any of this is going to get better through electoral politics. Any democracy now is performative. Both sides are bought and paid for. There is no significant, organized resistance to any of this. Material conditions will continue to get worse.
Think about it: it doesn't matter if you, as Larry Ellison or Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, have $200 billion or $300 billion or $400 billion. Like that has no impact on your life. There is nothing you can possibly buy that requires more wealth. The goal now is to preserve the system at any cost.
you should say what you're talking about because I for one have no idea.
No idea why OP alluded to it rather than just said it though.
Not dissimilar from Musk buying Twitter, objectively he overpaid by a ton for a business that wasn’t thriving. But I think time has shown that his purchase has paid political and ideological dividends. Which might be worth the money to him.
Also, it's not real money, it's debt equity. Equity transfers are just rich people toys. They move the actual cost into the entity they purchase, and if it fails, whatever, it didn't cost them anything.
It's all a grift.