Paramount Skydance secures $24bn from 3 Middle Eastern sovereign funds for Warner Bros. deal

Paramount Skydance has secured commitments of nearly $24 billion from sovereign wealth funds in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi to support its proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) has agreed to provide about $10 billion. The state-controlled funds from Qatar and Abu Dhabi will supply the rest, according to sources familiar with the deal. The Wall Street Journal first reported the funding breakdown.

A Paramount Skydance spokesperson declined to comment. The deal, which values Warner Bros. Discovery at an enterprise value of $111 billion, is subject to regulatory approvals. The companies expect it to close by the end of the third quarter of 2026.

Last month, the US. Acting Head of the Director of Justice’s antitrust division, Omeed Assefi, said the Paramount-WBD deal will “absolutely not” be on a fast-track for approval due to political reasons, in the context of the Ellison family’s friendly ties to Trump.

WBD has set April 23 for a special shareholders’ meeting to vote on the Paramount Skydance transaction.

Read also: Netflix withdraws Warner Bros bid, clearing Paramount’s path

Paramount’s offer for WBD as of Dec. 1 included an aggregate of $24 billion from the Middle Eastern funds, per an SEC filing at the time. Since then, the company has not disclosed how much the three funds might be contributing toward its winning bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, which WBD’s board of directors accepted in February after Netflix opted not to counter Paramount’s $31/share offer.

Meanwhile, in December, Paramount said Chinese gaming and internet company Tencent, which had committed $1 billion to the Paramount Skydance bid, was no longer a financing partner because of the WBD board’s concerns over foreign ownership. However, Tencent was back on board as an investor in the deal with fresh funding, Bloomberg News reported last month.

In March, seven Democratic U.S. senators issued a call for the FCC to conduct a “thorough review” of the foreign investors backing Paramount’s WBD proposed deal in a letter addressed to agency chairman Brendan Carr.

According to a story in the WSJ, Paramount executives do not anticipate that the involvement of Middle Eastern wealth funds will trigger an FCC review because each fund will hold “far less” than 25 percent of the new combined company. Separately, earlier last month, Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal criticised the Trump administration’s Treasury Department for not starting a CFIUS national security review of the Paramount Skydance deal for WBD.

David Ellison’s father, Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle and one of the wealthiest multibillionaires, committed up to $46.7 billion toward the winning WBD deal. The participation of the three Middle Eastern funds will reduce the total amount of equity Larry Ellison will need to contribute to the Warner Bros. acquisition.