Paramount is set to close its $110 billion Warner Bros. Discovery merger on October 6 as Skydance, under a settlement requiring 30 theatrical films a year. Households paying for both HBO Max and Paramount+ keep two apps for now, with no announced price or date for the merged service.
Perspective Coverage
9 publishers
- Builder
- Builder 10%
- Operator
- Operator 47%
- Investor
- Investor 43%
Reality
- Evidence74
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives60
- Confidence70
A DOJ inquiry into Andreessen Horowitz board seats at Databricks and Fivetran has run for nearly a year, and an unconditional merger clearance did not end it.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+10
- Incentives50
- Confidence55
The twelve attorneys general leave with two promises they will have to police themselves, and Free Press says parts of the deal ask less of Paramount than the two companies already do separately.
Reality
- Evidence33
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+28
- Incentives76
- Confidence41
Samyang, Sajo Dongaone, Daehan Flour Mills and TS Corporation have had payment and price-rollback orders put on hold, and the trials that decide whether the money is owed will turn on which sales the FTC counted.
Reality
- Evidence45
- Adoption30
- Hype gap+10
- Incentives65
- Confidence55
On Decoder, former DOJ antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter takes up the frontier labs' request for permission to coordinate on safety. His first point is that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Elon Musk do not much like each other.
Reality
- Evidence38
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+32
- Incentives62
- Confidence45
Economists tracking German fuel margins after 2017 found the increase showed up only where two rivals in the same market had automated their pricing. The FTC says Amazon's Nessie tool reached a similar result by design.
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption66
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives55
- Confidence55
Amazon's Project Nessie raised prices where rivals' repricing software was likely to follow, and the FTC puts the take at more than $1 billion over six years. The core federal claims go to trial in October 2026.
Reality
- Evidence34
- Adoption52
- Hype gap+18
- Incentives74
- Confidence42
The remedy people familiar with the probe describe is a penalty rather than an unwind, and nobody has put a figure on it, which leaves the cost of routing a $17bn deal around merger review still blank.
Reality
- Evidence45
- Adoption68
- Hype gap+22
- Incentives62
- Confidence52
The New York Times says the Justice Department has sent a formal demand for information about the $20 billion Groq agreement, which puts a structuring assumption much of the industry uses into investigators' hands.
Reality
- Evidence32
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+18
- Incentives62
- Confidence38
The Antitrust Division says the withdrawal is neither an enforcement action nor a finding of violation, and under its own rules the letter only ever covered ISS, which is why the brief DOJ filed in May 2025 carries more weight.
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption60
- Hype gap+12
- Incentives58
- Confidence57
STAT reports investigators are asking about Epic's employee non-competes and its control of hospital data access. No charges are near, but procurement assumptions should move now.
Reality
- Evidence46
- Adoption90
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives70
- Confidence52
Two partners, two portfolio companies that grew into rivals, and an antitrust statute almost never pointed at VCs. The cost of that theory falls on any firm making several bets in one category.
Reality
- Evidence38
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+12
- Incentives58
- Confidence42
A nearly year-old interlocking-directorate inquiry names Databricks and Fivetran. The usual remedy is a resignation, which makes a board seat a term of investment worth repricing.
Reality
- Evidence52
- Adoption34
- Hype gap+18
- Incentives66
- Confidence56