Ted Sarandos has brushed off Donald Trump‘s social media demand that Netflix fire board member Susan Rice, saying the streamer’s bid for Warner Bros. Discovery is a business matter and not a political one.
“He likes to do a lot of things on social media,” the Netflix co-CEO and chief content officer told BBC Radio 4’s “Today” program Monday morning when host Amol Rajan asked him to respond to the president’s intervention. Sarandos added: “This is a business deal. It’s not a political deal. This deal is run by the Department of Justice in the U.S. and regulators throughout Europe and around the world.”
The remarks came after Trump on Sunday reshared a post by MAGA influencer Laura Loomer calling on him to kill the Netflix-Warner deal, adding that “Netflix should fire racist Trump deranged Susan Rice immediately, or pay the consequences.” Rice, a former Obama administration diplomat, currently sits on the Netflix board.
Sarandos was speaking in London the morning after the BAFTA Film Awards, which he attended, and ahead of a visit to the National Film and Television School, where Netflix is announcing a fresh donation. The streamer has around 320 million subscribers globally, with nearly 20 million in the U.K. alone.
The interview came at a pivotal moment in the contest for Warner Bros. Discovery. Netflix tabled an $83 billion bid for the company’s streaming assets on Dec. 5. Three days later, Paramount — led by David Ellison, son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison — launched a hostile rival bid for the entire company at $108 billion. The Warner Bros. Discovery board has repeatedly stated its preference for the Netflix offer, but gave Paramount until later Monday to table a best and final bid.
Sarandos made the case for the Netflix deal in blunt terms. “Our deal is growth,” he said, noting the company has spent $6 billion on original programming in the U.K. since 2020 and created 50,000 jobs there. He characterized the Paramount approach as “the classic horizontal media mergers that are always bad for consumers, always bad for creators,” warning that if Paramount’s bid succeeded, Hollywood’s five major studios would be reduced to four. He also noted that Paramount has committed to cutting $6 billion from the business immediately after a deal closes, with an additional $16 billion in cuts needed to delever. “You look at that and think, ‘Wow, this industry will be much smaller under that ownership than it would be under Netflix ownership,’” he said.
Asked by Rajan about the argument he made to Trump for the Netflix deal, Sarandos pointed to its growth credentials. “This is a vertical merger. We’re buying assets that we don’t currently have — a movie studio and a distribution entity,” he said, emphasizing that Netflix would be adding to the market rather than shrinking it.
He also weighed in on the role of sovereign wealth funds in the Paramount consortium, which previously included Jared Kushner. Asked whether it was wrong for foreign governments to hold a financial stake in news networks, Sarandos said: “I think it’s a bad idea, typically.” He noted that some of the Gulf states involved “are not very big on the First Amendment” and said the suggestion that they would exercise no editorial influence over CNN and CBS “seems very odd to me, with the level of investment that we’re talking about.”
On filmmaker James Cameron, who wrote to the chair of the Senate antitrust subcommittee warning that a Netflix acquisition would be “disastrous for the theatrical motion picture business,” Sarandos said he found the intervention “disingenuous.” He said he personally met with Cameron on Dec. 20 and discussed Netflix’s commitment to 45-day theatrical exclusivity for Warner Bros. films. “We spent five minutes of our conversation on that, and we talked mostly about these glasses that he’s developing for Meta to watch movies at home,” Sarandos said. He argued that the average Netflix member watches seven movies a month, compared with the average American’s two cinema visits a year. “If more people see movies, the better, deeper, richer relationship they have with movies,” he said. “I don’t lose any business to the movie theaters.”
Sarandos pushed back on claims that Netflix crowds out homegrown British television, noting the streamer currently has 59 productions under way in the U.K., of which only around 17 are non-British projects. Asked pointedly whether Netflix would ever have made ITV’s “Mr. Bates vs the Post Office,” he replied without hesitation: “I would have made it in a heartbeat. I’m shocked that people use that example.”
On a parliamentary committee proposal that major streamers contribute 5% of their U.K. subscriber revenue to a cultural fund for British-focused drama, Sarandos was skeptical. “Incentive works much better than obligation,” he said, arguing that the U.K. had benefited greatly from production incentives and that adding obligations could undermine those economic gains.
Sarandos identified YouTube as a major competitive force, noting the platform accounts for close to 9% of all television viewing time in the U.K., with 55% of YouTube watching now taking place on TV sets. “That’s a zero sum game — the time that you spend on a connected TV, if you’re watching one app, you’re not watching broadcast, you’re not watching BBC, you’re not watching ITV and you’re not watching any other streaming service, including Netflix,” he said, adding that studios and broadcasters continuing to supply YouTube with free programming while it grows at their expense struck him as counterproductive.
On podcasts, Sarandos described them as a natural evolution of the late-night chat show. “It’s the new generation of chat shows, where you don’t have to make one show that appeals to everybody,” he said, pointing to their lower production costs and more specialized audiences as part of a broader diversification of the entertainment landscape.
Listen to Sarandos’ full interview on BBC Radio 4’s “Today” here.
