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How Much Did Disney Really Pay for Fox?

David Rosenthal says the real price of the Fox assets Disney kept was about $44 billion. Comcast lobbed in a late bid during regulatory approval, after a different ruling around AT&T's merger, and pushed the signed deal up to $71.3 billion, a full $19 billion more than Disney had originally agreed to pay. The extra $19 billion went to Fox shareholders. Disney's market cap at the time was around $170 billion, so the headline price was like 40% of the entire Walt Disney Company, way more than Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm combined.

Disney paid down a lot of the purchase price quickly by selling Fox's regional sports networks and its stake in Sky, the British pay TV operator. The sales were $14 billion and $15 billion. Together they back the price down $29 billion, leaving about $44 billion as the hurdle for the acquisition to pay back.

Disney probably does not get anywhere near $44 billion of value out of the assets it keeps. The library assets for the streaming service are nice to have, but they are not really going to drive that many signups or retentions.

Grokipedia·Pixar·Marvel

Transcript

Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire ·

Acquired

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