Paramount & Skydance shake hands, DOJ sues Ticketmaster, Fintech in trouble

📽️ ENTERTAINMENT NEWS 📽️

• Paramount and Skydance have agreed to terms of a merger. Skydance’s latest offer of $8 billion, which is backed by a consortium of investors including RedBird Capital and KKR and has received support from the media conglomerate’s independent special committee. It is said that David Ellison will install his own leadership team led by former NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell and merge Skydance into Paramount.

• The DOJ on May 23 announced it filed an antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation Entertainment and its subsidiary Ticketmaster. Attorney General Merrick Garland accuses the company of monopolizing the live entertainment industry, restricting musicians’ and other performing artists’ access to performing venues and inflating prices for fans.

• A year after Spotify first increased the price of plans in the US, it’s happening again. Spotify has announce users in the US will now pay $11.99 a month for premium, $13.99 a month for duo, and $19.99 a month for a family plan. This led to backlash by users and musicians on a public post made by CEO Daniel Ek.

🏈 SPORTS BUSINESS 🏈

• Warner Bros. Discovery remains in a contentious media rights deal with the NBA, as TNT is starting to sunset out of broadcasting NBA games for the time being. This follows comments made by CEO David Zaslav saying ““We don’t have to have the NBA,”. Commentator and former NBA player Charles Barkley has revealed his frustrations by saying ““These people that I work with, they’ve screwed things up… They've done a really shitty job of keeping us abreast.”

• TKO Group Holdings, the parent company of UFC and WWE is combining the live-event groups of the two. The move will result in a unified group called the TKO Live Events Strategy Team, and will be led by Peter Dropick, who has been part of UFC’s live event leadership for almost two decades. In January, the business combined the two leagues’ sports marketing divisions in a similar move.

• Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) has established SRJ Sports Investments, a sports investment company that aims to accelerate the growth of the sports sector, with the focus will invest in acquiring and creating new sports events IP, commercial rights of popular and prominent sports competitions and hosting major global events in Saudi Arabia and rest of the MENA region

🏢 STARTUP NEWS 🏢

• xAI, the AI startup created by Elon Musk, announced a $6 billion round of funding as it attempts to compete with OpenAI, Google, and others. The raise will help bring its’ first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies. Musk has been critical of his former company OpenAI and its partnership with Microsoft in the past.

• 85,000 customers for the former fin-tech saving app Yotta with a combined $112 million in savings have been locked out of their accounts for the last 3 weeks. This stems from a dispute between its’ banking partners Synapse and Evolve Bank & Trust — which led to the lockup of accounts at Yotta and at least two dozen other startups. Synapse declared bankruptcy earlier this year after several key clients abandoned the firm amid disagreements over the tracking of customer funds.

• Founded by female founders Nikki Varanasi, Lucy Yang and Victoria Yang, Parrot Finance is a social investing platform focused on trade-mimicking and real-time trade alerts from vetted, top financial influencers. Parrot has raised more than $2 million from investors, including Techstars, Western Union Co., Harlem Capital, Lightspeed, former Apex Clearing leadership and Litquidity, as well as a community round on the platform Wefunder.

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