By Isabella Simonetti and Ben Dummett
Gerry Cardinale wants to tell you why Paramount is the best buyer for Warner Bros. Discovery.
The head of RedBird Capital Partners and Paramount CEO David Ellison's close confidant has spent the week in Europe with Paramount executives, in part to lobby regulators to back its bid and reject Netflix's deal. He hosted a dinner at a private club in London on Thursday for Ellison.
Cardinale will tell anyone who will listen that it creates competition. That Ellison "has done more for Warner Brothers shareholders in three months" than CEO David Zaslav "has done in three years." And that Warner's $72 billion deal with streaming giant Netflix "kills competition."
"We're not running for student council, OK? This is serious s -- ," he said on a December episode of the popular Hollywood podcast "The Town."
The transaction would put the storied Hollywood studio behind "Mission: Impossible" and "The Godfather" under the same ownership as the powerhouse that brought the Harry Potter series and "Casablanca" to the big screen. The combined company would also be home to news outlets CNN and CBS, streaming services Paramount+ and HBO Max and a host of cable networks.
Cardinale and Ellison have a lot more work to do -- and a lot riding on it. RedBird is the second-largest shareholder in Paramount after the Ellisons.
Warner has agreed to sell its studios and HBO Max streaming service to the streaming giant, leaving its cable assets as a separate company. Netflix is preparing to make its bid all cash to make it more attractive to shareholders.
Warner has recommended that shareholders reject Paramount's hostile $77.9 billion all-cash bid for the entire company. Its board chairman said Paramount's bid provides "insufficient value" and relies on "an extraordinary amount of debt financing."
If Cardinale succeeds in making Paramount's case to shareholders and regulators, he will have helped clinch one of the highest-profile media deals in a generation just months after Paramount's merger with Skydance -- and steal victory from a streaming service that has transformed Hollywood. If the effort fails, it will be another bruise for an investment firm that recently stumbled in its attempt at another big deal buying the U.K.'s Telegraph and its sister paper the Spectator.
"If the Warner deal gets done, which everybody's in the middle of, you know, he's at the table with one of the biggest media companies in the world," said Ari Emanuel, the Hollywood power agent turned media executive.
Cardinale, a 58-year-old former Goldman Sachs partner, has said that he is betting his firm on Ellison's success with Paramount.
Cardinale grew up in Villanova, Penn., an affluent suburb on Philadelphia's Main Line, and attended The Haverford School, an all-boys prep school.
Cardinale graduated from Harvard, where he was on the crew team and was awarded a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford. After Oxford and a stint at a think tank in Japan, he launched his career at Goldman Sachs in Asia.
While at Goldman, he met then-Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, and talked to him about ways to take more control of the New York team's intellectual property. Cardinale wasn't an avid sports fan or watcher of TV and movies, but he saw sports and media as underloved areas in dealmaking.
The conversations with Steinbrenner turned out to be a big break: Cardinale has been credited with helping to create the YES regional sports network which launched in 2002.
"A lot of people wilt in the big games," said Yankees President Randy Levine. "He shows up."
It was the first proof point of an approach that has moved Cardinale's work beyond the traditional private equity playbook of buying low and trying to sell higher. He is instead fashioning himself after cable pioneer John Malone, who built a stable of connectivity and sports assets including Formula One, Sirius XM and Live Nation. Malone happens to be a Warner shareholder.
Cardinale prioritizes partnerships with powerful families and individuals. He has worked on sports and media deals with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, Dallas Cowboys Owner Jerry Jones and Emanuel, who is executive chair and CEO of TKO. Paramount struck a seven-year, $7.7 billion deal with TKO last year for exclusive media rights for all Ultimate Fighting Championship events in the U.S.
RedBird's portfolio includes the soccer team AC Milan, the Artists Equity Film studio, which RedBird founded with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and Fenway Sports Group.
Cardinale hires industry experts to weigh in on and manage the firm's investments. TV news veteran Chris Wallace and former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter are among its employees.
"Gerry's got a good track record, he's thoughtful, he's diligent," said David Solomon, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs.
Not all of his deals have panned out. RedBird IMI, a partnership between Cardinale's firm and Abu Dhabi's International Media Investments, made an audacious move in 2023 to acquire the Telegraph and its sister paper the Spectator, attempting to take control of the U.K. publications for about GBP600 million, equivalent to $757 million.
But the firm drastically underestimated the opposition it would face from U.K. politicians and journalists over the deal, largely because of the joint venture's ownership structure. Cardinale is now trying to sell the Telegraph to the owner of the U.K.'s Daily Mail, though a deal remains unresolved as the Daily Mail's parent company Rothermere Continuation Holdings awaits government approval.
His acquisition of AC Milan has proven more successful. RedBird bought the Italian soccer team in 2022 for EUR1.2 billion, equivalent to a little more than $1.2 billion, from Elliott Investment Management. Cardinale and the other members of AC Milan's senior management faced fan protests last May over the team's operations and the club's performance on the field.
Today, AC Milan stands second in the Italian Serie A league and has done well financially under RedBird's ownership.
Cardinale was introduced to Ellison seven years ago when first considering an investment in Skydance. The connection was made by Andy Gordon, who is now Paramount chief strategy officer and chief operating officer. RedBird took a stake in Skydance in 2020.
Cardinale helped Ellison assemble members of his leadership team at Paramount: Gordon was previously a partner at RedBird, and President Jeff Shell was chairman of RedBird's sports and media division.
That deal catapulted Cardinale to the center of the Ellisons' inner circle and put him at the forefront of the fight for Warner. Inside Paramount, some call Cardinale "The Godfather," a nod to the studio's famed film, because of his role as a guru of sorts to its top brass, people who work with him say.
He spent the fall traveling to the Middle East convincing sovereign-wealth funds to join him in backing Paramount's bid.
Ellison, who now considers Cardinale a friend, praised his foresight and ability to make disciplined decisions. "His insights have been pivotal to our success," he said.
Write to Isabella Simonetti at isabella.simonetti@wsj.com and Ben Dummett at ben.dummett@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 16, 2026 12:10 ET (17:10 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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