Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said in an interview published Tuesday that there was “no political interference” from President Donald Trump in the company’s bid to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery.
“The president is interested in entertainment and interested in deals, so he was curious about the mechanics of things and how things were going to go or whatever, but he made it very clear that this was under the DOJ,” Sarandos told Politico Europe, referring to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Netflix last month dropped its bid to purchase WBD’s streaming and studios business after Paramount sweetened its competitive offer for the entire company, which includes cable channels like CNN and TNT. The news came hours after Sarandos visited Washington, D.C. for meetings with DOJ and White House officials, the latter of which were ultimately canceled.
Sarandos acknowledged that Trump’s public comments weighing in on the deal led “to the beliefs of things that do and sometimes that don’t materialize at all,” but he said his conversations with him were “100 percent about the industry, protecting the industry.”
“And I think it’s very healthy that the president of the United States speaks to business leaders about industries that are important to the economy,” he said.
Instead, Sarandos said the two discussed Trump’s desire to impose tariffs on foreign-made movies. Sarandos said he “hopefully talked to him the way out of them” and advocated for a tax-incentive approach in states.
He said the public interest in his visit to Washington last month stemmed from how Netflix is “clickbait” and acknowledged that the specter of meeting with Trump administration officials was “a pretty juicy story.”
“There was paparazzi outside of the White House waiting for me when I came out,” he said. “I’ve never experienced that before.”
Politico’s Carrie Budoff Brown asked Sarandos about the perception that Paramount chief David Ellison relationship with people in power in Washington “might have swayed or changed the dynamic at the end with where Warner Bros. went.” Sarandos said he couldn’t “speak to what their thinking is on it.”
Sarandos met with Trump last year and has acknowledged the deal came up, but he told Bloomberg that “once it was clear that we weren’t in the CNN business, it was a lot less interesting.”
“He didn’t care that much more about our deal,” he said.
