US President Donald Trump has raised concerns about possible antitrust issues tied to streaming giant Netflix’s plan to acquire rival Warner Bros. Discovery, according to a report by Bloomberg.
Speaking to reporters, Trump said he would personally step in to review the process and closely examine the details of the proposed deal.
Netflix–Warner Deal: What Donald Trump Said
“This has to go through a process, and we’ll see what happens,” Trump said during a media interaction on December 7.
He also confirmed that he recently met Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos and praised the company’s success, while still flagging potential concerns. “But it has a large market share. That could be a problem,” Trump noted.
Emphasizing his worries, the president added that Netflix already holds a major share of the streaming market, and that owning Warner Bros. would boost that share even more. “When they own Warner Bros., you know, that share goes up a lot,” he said, confirming he plans to stay personally involved in the final decision-making.
The proposed $72 billion deal would bring together the world’s largest streaming platform, Netflix, with HBO Max, currently the fourth-largest streaming service. The merger has already caught the attention of antitrust regulators.
In the United States, the agreement will be reviewed by the Justice Department’s antitrust division, which is expected to argue that the deal could be illegal if the combined market share pushes Netflix well beyond the 30% threshold typically used as a regulatory benchmark.
Netflix is expected to counter those concerns by saying that other major platforms — including Google’s YouTube and ByteDance’s TikTok — should be included in the market analysis. Factoring in those services would weaken claims about Netflix’s market dominance.
Bloomberg previously reported that Sarandos met Trump at the White House to lobby in favor of the acquisition — a meeting Trump later confirmed. During the discussion, the Netflix executive argued that the company was far from being an all-powerful monopoly and even pointed to a period of subscriber losses several years ago, according to people familiar with the matter.