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Allen & Company

News and notes on Byron Allen’s bid and the Paramount suitor carousel. Plus, Nelson Peltz’s script for the Disney turnaround.

byron allen
Shari Redstone is likely seeing a red flashing warning sign about the viability of Byron Allen’s $30 billion equity-and-debt offer for Paramount. Photo: Jerod Harris/Getty Images for Vox Media
William D. Cohan
February 4, 2024

Byron Allen, the media entrepreneur who very publicly made a $14 billion offer for Paramount Global, plus the assumption of the company’s $15 billion in debt, poses a very particular kind of dilemma for Shari Redstone and her M&A adviser, Byron Trott. On the one hand, Allen Media is not without its successes. It’s a private company, so it’s hard to know how things are going, but Allen has a net worth estimated by Bloomberg at $735 million, and he owns the Weather Channel, which he told my partner Matt Belloni the other day is very profitable for him. He also owns a bunch of local television stations.