Trump Gives TikTok and Oracle Deal His ‘Blessing'

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Hello Los Angeles!

In a week where everyone was already arguing about what “the future of entertainment” is supposed to look like, Netflix decided to skip the debate and buy a giant piece of the past and, possibly, the future. Netflix announced a definitive agreement to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery’s Studios and Streaming business, including Warner Bros. film and television studios plus HBO and HBO Max. This is not just another media merger. It is a power transfer, from the studio era where the gatekeepers were greenlight committees to the platform era where the gatekeepers are subscriber relationships, home screens, and retention math.

Here are the bones of the deal. WBD shareholders would receive $27.75 per share, made up of $23.25 in cash and $4.50 in Netflix stock, with the stock portion subject to a symmetrical collar. Netflix puts the transaction at roughly $72 billion in equity value and $82.7 billion in enterprise value, and expects it to close in 12 to 18 months, but only after WBD completes its planned separation of its Global Networks business into Discovery Global, now expected in Q3 2026.

Now zoom in on why this matters in Los Angeles specifically.

LA’s creative engine is about to be run by a single, very efficient distribution machine

Warner Bros. is not just a studio. It is an institutional muscle memory for how to develop, package, and produce at scale, plus a library and franchises that can carry a business through multiple economic cycles. Netflix is not just a distributor. It is the largest direct to consumer entertainment subscription platform on earth, built around global reach, product iteration, and data feedback loops. Put them together and you get a company that can create, market, distribute, and monetize premium entertainment without needing anyone else’s permission.

That will sound exciting to some creators and terrifying to others, often for the same reason. When the same entity owns the audience relationship and the content factory, it can take bigger swings because it has more margin for error. It can also take fewer swings because it does not need to. The incentive shifts from “What is culturally important?” to “What makes people stay?” Those are sometimes the same question. Sometimes they are not.

This deal won’t be decided in a writers’ room. It’ll be decided by regulators.

This is exactly the type of consolidation regulators have been itching to interrogate. A combined Netflix plus HBO Max instantly raises questions about market power, competition, and pricing, plus downstream effects on theaters, independent studios, and negotiating leverage with talent. Even if Netflix vows to maintain current operations and keep the consumer experience strong, the political story is straightforward: fewer giant buyers typically means less bargaining power for everyone who sells into the system.

Also worth noting, Reuters reports a termination fee of $5.8 billion under certain circumstances, which tells you both sides are bracing for a drawn out, high scrutiny process.

The quiet subtext: the bundle is coming back, just wearing a streaming hoodie

Netflix will almost certainly pitch this as more choice and better value. Regulators will hear less competition. Consumers will hear how much is this going to cost me. The most plausible end state is not a single mega app on day one. It is a reimagined bundle: separate brands, packaged pricing, shared sign on, cross promotion, and eventually tighter integration if the politics and churn math allow it.

The real disruption is not whether HBO Max keeps its name. It is whether Netflix becomes the default front door to premium scripted entertainment globally.

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Happy Friday LA!

While the market obsesses over the latest AI tool, one of the most interesting checks this week went to something more basic and much harder to fake: women’s health.

Perelel, a doctor founded, research backed supplement company for women, just raised 27 million dollars in growth funding led by Prelude Growth Partners, with existing investors including Unilever Ventures, Willow Growth Partners and Selva Ventures coming back in. Co founded by CEO Victoria Thain Gioia, who comes from a background in finance and operating roles at consumer brands, former media executive Alex Taylor, and OB GYN Dr. Banafsheh Bayati, the company has spent the last five years quietly building a profitable business that has doubled revenue year over year and has some of the strongest subscriber retention in its category.

Image Source: Perelel

The wellness aisle is crowded with influencer brands and one size fits all multivitamins. Perelel is trying to be the adult in the room. The team designs products with OB GYN input, clinical backing and formulas tailored to specific chapters of a woman’s hormonal life, from fertility and pregnancy to postpartum, perimenopause and beyond. Most of its line now carries a Clean Label Project Purity Award, which is a polite way of saying they’re willing to have someone else check what’s actually in the bottle.

This round is less about a splashy launch and more about upgrading the cap table and the support system. The founders used the raise to buy out early angel investors and bring in Prelude Growth, a women-founded firm with a track record in modern consumer health and beauty. The new capital is aimed at deeper research, more life stage specific products and broader distribution rather than chasing the trend of the month.

In a category that has historically treated women’s health as an afterthought, a clinically serious, women led company raising growth capital to build a full lifecycle platform feels like a meaningful data point. Scroll down for this week’s LA venture deals, funds and acquisitions.

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Hello LA!

If you are reading this while watching the clouds stack up over the city, you are not wrong. The forecast is calling for heavy rain and possible flooding through Sunday, so consider this your permission slip to cancel a few plans, stay dry and catch up on what the hard-tech crowd has been building this week.

Let us start with the least subtle name in local defense tech. CHAOS Industries just closed a $510 million dollar round led by Valor Equity Partners, valuing the company at $4.5 billion dollars and pushing its total funding past the $1 billion dollar mark in under three years. The company builds Coherent Distributed Networks radar, essentially a mesh of smaller, lower cost sensors that can pick up drones and other low flying threats minutes earlier than legacy radar systems, a gap that has become painfully obvious on modern battlefields. The new capital is going toward product development and manufacturing so militaries and border agencies can actually field these systems at scale rather than treating them as one-off experiments.

What makes CHAOS interesting is not just the size of the round but the architecture choice. Instead of a single massive radar on a hill, they are betting on distributed, software first networks that can be upgraded, repositioned and re-tasked as threats change. It is a very cloud-era way of thinking about defense hardware, and it is pulling engineers from a mix of aerospace, gaming and traditional software backgrounds into a category that used to be the domain of slow, closed incumbents.

Image Source: Valar Atomics

If CHAOS is focused on keeping the skies manageable, Valar Atomics wants to keep the lights on for everything that needs compute. The Hawthorne based nuclear startup raised $130 million dollars in Series A funding led by Snowpoint Ventures, with participation from Crosscut Ventures and a roster of deep tech backers that includes Palmer Luckey and Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar. Valar is building compact, high temperature gas reactors that use TRISO fuel and helium coolant, designed for strong safety characteristics and very high operating temperatures.

Instead of a single gigantic nuclear plant, Valar’s plan is to mass produce one standardized reactor design and cluster hundreds of them on “gigasites” that sit directly behind the meter for big energy users. Think hydrogen production, AI data centers, heavy industry and synthetic fuel plants, not just electrons on the grid. Construction is already underway on a first test reactor in Utah, targeted for completion in 2026, and the company is positioning itself as part of a new wave of nuclear companies that treat reactors as a product you replicate, not a megaproject you tolerate.

Image Source: Waymo

On the consumer side, your weekend mobility options are getting an upgrade too, weather permitting. Waymo has begun routing paid robotaxi rides onto freeways in Los Angeles, alongside San Francisco and Phoenix, after years of staying mostly on surface streets. The company says freeway segments can cut some trip times by as much as half, making a driverless ride to LAX or a cross town trek on the 405 feel less like a novelty and more like a practical option. Regulators and human drivers now have to figure out what it means to share the fast lane with cars that never get tired and never text at red lights.

Image Source: Apple

Apple is also coming for the least fun part of any LA trip: the airport ID check. The new Digital ID feature lets you create a passport based identity inside Apple Wallet that TSA will accept at more than 250 airports for domestic travel, including LAX. You scan your passport, verify with Face ID and then present your Digital ID at TSA checkpoints using your iPhone or Apple Watch without handing over your device. It will not replace a physical passport for international flights, but it does mean boarding passes, credit cards and ID can all live in the same tap-to-go flow the next time you sprint to Terminal 4.

Between radar that sees drones earlier, reactors that promise industrial scale clean power and robotaxis that hop on the freeway, a lot of the future is quietly being wired in while you hunt for an umbrella. Stay safe, stay dry this weekend and keep scrolling for this week’s venture rounds, fund announcements and acquisitions.

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