Bought: How a Grudge, a Billionaire, and $110 Billion Decided Who Controls Hollywood (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798250518918)

In December 2025, the most valuable library of stories in America went up for sale, and the cleanest bid won. Netflix had agreed to pay more than eighty billion dollars for the Warner Bros. studio and HBO. The seller's board had blessed the deal and defended it twice. The photographs of the winners touring the lot in their white sneakers looked like the last page of the story.

Ten weeks later the deal was dead. The company passed instead to the bidder the board had rejected, a man whose father was among the president's closest friends, and whose offer carried something no rival could match. Folded inside the company was CNN, the news network the president had said, out loud and more than once, he wanted sold.

Bought is the definitive account of the largest bidding war in the history of American media, and of the quiet machinery that decided it. It follows three men who wanted the same prize and carried three theories of power: the cost-cutter who built the company and broke it, the most trusted operator in Hollywood who won the auction on the merits, and the heir who lost it on the merits and then won it anyway, by reaching past the market to the one authority that could overrule a board, a contract, and a free market at once.

What unfolds is a story about far more than a corporate sale. It is about what happens to a free press when the state decides who is permitted to own it, reconstructed entirely from the public record: the filings, the hearing testimony, the public statements, and the timeline that binds them together.

This is an independent, unauthorized work of journalism and commentary. It has not been authorized or endorsed by Netflix, Paramount Skydance, Warner Bros. Discovery, or any person or company discussed within it, and it is drawn entirely from sources already in the public record.