Good morning. Well, so much for that Harry Potter vs the K-Pop Demon Hunters TV series I was waiting for. As of Thursday night, it’s not in the cards, as Netflix is officially walking away from its deal to acquire Warner Bros Discovery. Netflix had been ready to do an $83 billion deal for the famed studio, which owns the Harry Potter franchise as well Game of Thrones, DC Comics, HBO, and many other popular properties. And it would have marked a triumphant moment for the streaming video service, which began as a humble DVD-by-mail rental company in 1998.
But ultimately, Netflix was no match for another, older titan of Big Tech: Larry Ellison. The cofounder of Oracle backstopped his son David’s bid to acquire Warner Bros and fold it into his growing Paramount empire. The Ellisons claimed the prize Thursday for the tidy sum of $111 billion—cash.
“This transaction was always a ‘nice to have’ at the right price, not a ‘must have’ at any price,” Netflix’s co-CEOs said in a statement Thursday. And so ends another exciting episode of tech-media consolidation.
Alexei Oreskovic
@lexnfx
alexei.oreskovic@fortune.com
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Marc Benioff is not afraid of the 'SaaS-pocalypse'
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff insists he isn’t worried about a "SaaS-pocalypse.” In the company’s earnings call, Benioff pushed back against fears that AI will render business software obsolete, even as the company's revenue forecast rattled Wall Street.
Benioff pointed to Agentforce, Salesforce's AI tool that autonomously handles tasks like customer service, as proof that the business is evolving to meet the AI era.
“If there is a ‘SaaS-pocalypse’, it may be eaten by the ‘SaaS-quatch’ because there are a lot of companies using a lot of SaaS because it just got better with agents,” Benioff said. “Anthropic runs its whole operation on Salesforce and Slack. I think every AI company does.”
Salesforce's AI products now generate $2.9 billion in annual recurring revenue, doubling from the prior quarter. However, that figure still represents a small fraction of the company's overall business. Salesforce projected full-year revenue of $45.8–$46.2 billion, with a midpoint just shy of analyst expectations. But Benioff also said that demand for agentic AI, would drive fiscal 2030 revenue to a total $63 billion, above the $60 billion target Salesforce outlined at its October investor day, according to Barrons.
And while it's not clear if Benioff's SaaS-quatch speech ultimately convinced any of the AI-spooked bears out there, Salesforce's announcement of $50 billion in additional buybacks went down as smoothly as some good old backwoods bourbon. Salesforce shares, which have been down roughly 30% this year, finished Thursday's regular session up 4%.—Beatrice Nolan
Instagram to alert parents of kids' dangerous searches
Instagram said Thursday it will start alerting parents if their kids repeatedly search for terms clearly associated with suicide or self-harm. The alerts will only go to parents who are enrolled in Instagram’s parental supervision program.
The alerts will be sent via email, text or WhatsApp, depending on the parent’s contact information available, as well as a notification through the parent’s Instagram account. Meta said it is also working on similar notifications to parents about their kids’ interactions with artificial intelligence.
The announcement comes as Meta is in the midst of two trials over harms to children. A trial underway in Los Angeles questions whether Meta’s platforms deliberately addict and harm minors. Another, in New Mexico, seeks to determine whether Meta failed to protect kids from sexual exploitation on its platforms.
“Our goal is to empower parents to step in if their teen’s searches suggest they may need support. We also want to avoid sending these notifications unnecessarily, which, if done too much, could make the notifications less useful overall,” Meta said in a blog post.—The Associated Press
Mistral AI inks deal with Accenture
European model maker Mistral AI, which has faded somewhat from the day-to-day conversation about AI’s front-runners, just scored a meaningful vote of confidence by landing Accenture as a major new 'systems integrator' partner. According to the Wall Street Journal, under a multi-year deal, Accenture will make Mistral’s models and tools available to enterprise customers as it helps them move from AI pilots to full-scale deployment.
The partnership adds Accenture to a Mistral customer list that already includes IBM, Cisco, SAP, Stellantis, and ASML, which invested more than $1.5 billion for an ~11% stake last year, valuing the Paris-based startup at nearly $14 billion. —Sharon Goldman
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