Now that the battle for Paramount has entered the black box phase, wherein everyone stays quiet and the bankers and lawyers help Shari Redstone decide to sell her company to either RedBird and Skydance (and face shareholder lawsuits aplenty) or Apollo and Sony (and face months of government scrutiny) or just say Fuck it, and keep going it alone (without much of a strategy, or an individual C.E.O., and down four board members). There aren’t any brilliant solutions at this point, particularly with her potential partners all likely feeling some level of deal fatigue amid this indecisive and self-destructive auction process. That’s in part why I think the person most likely to walk away with some of the most interesting, and potentially strategic, spoils of this war will be our friend David Zaslav at Warner Bros. Discovery.