00:00Now we want to go from that to some high drama in Hollywood. It all surrounds the Paramount-Warner
00:04Brothers deal. A person familiar with Paramount's plan saying the board has approved a possible
00:09move to actually leave the state of California. And that could actually happen as early as October
00:131st. But California Attorney General Rob Bonta, he's calling these reported plans blackmail.
00:19Josh Sisco covers antitrust for us here at Bloomberg. Josh, what do we know about this?
00:24Is this just all just kind of politicking or is Paramount actually serious?
00:28I think there's a lot of politics behind it, but I think Paramount is seriously considering
00:33all its options. Yesterday, there was an event in Sacramento where both Rob Bonta, the California
00:39AG, and Macon Delrahim, Paramount's head lawyer who's sort of quarterbacking this for the company,
00:45they both spoke separately at this event and they kind of reiterated these comments. Macon
00:51Delrahim, the Paramount lawyer, said that if at all possible, they want to stay in California,
00:57David Ellison, CEO, lives there, his family's there, but they have to think about all of
01:03their options is kind of how he framed it. There's another interesting sort of thing going
01:09on right now in the world of antitrust, and it's not as sexy as Hollywood, it involves
01:13elevators. Now, this has nothing to do with David Ellison, right? No, it's that classic combo
01:18of elevators in movies, but no, nothing to do with Ellison. Yeah, DOJ, the Justice Department,
01:25they opened an investigation into Cohn's proposed takeover of TK Elevator, which would create,
01:34it's the number three and four elevator companies in the world merging to create the world's biggest
01:40elevator company. And that kind of, that size of a deal and the level of, you know, sort of
01:47commerce involved sort of is naturally going to draw scrutiny from around the world.
01:52And the companies have said they expect to sell assets and are engaged with regulators. But yet,
02:00the Justice Department is now formally investigating the merger, which could take as much as a year or
02:06more.
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