• Would you like to own CNN, TNT, and the Discovery Channel?
• Warner Bros. Discovery owns them now — but wants to get rid of them.
• WBD's move follows a similar one Comcast announced a few months ago. Because while cable TV networks still make money, they're a business in permanent decline.

No one wants to own cable networks anymore.

Would you like to buy some?

That is the pitch that Warner Bros. Discovery is making to Wall Street now that it has announced it's splitting itself into two companies: One will own Warners' movie and television studio and the HBO Max streaming service; the other — which it's calling its "global networks" unit — will own a bunch of cable TV networks including CNN, TNT, Discovery and the Food Network.

If that sounds familiar, it's for two reasons:

WBD has been contemplating this for a long time.

Last summer, it floated the same idea but didn't go forward with it. In December, it all but said it was going to do this, after all, by splitting itself up internally. Now it's doing it for real.

Comcast is doing the same thing.

Last October, Comcast said it would bundle almost all of its cable channels into a separate company (which it's calling Versant, for some reason) and hang onto its movie and TV studio and its Peacock streaming service.

Like Comcast, WBD insists that no, really, it's splitting off its cable TV networks so they can grow and thrive on their own, and you'd be lucky to buy a piece of them.

"The global networks business is a real business," WBD CEO David Zaslav said on the company's investor call Monday morning.

That is definitely true, since those cable networks continue to generate profits. It's also something you don't normally feel compelled to say when you're selling something people want to buy.

Because the big picture here is that both WBD and Comcast have concluded what investors — and people who watch things on TV — have concluded long ago: The cable TV business is a shrinking business, as more and more people cut the cord or simply never sign up for one. And the people who continue to watch cable TV are getting older and smaller in number.

The WBD split will generate all kinds of questions to ponder. Some of them are technical: How will WBD's $35 billion in debt be split up between the companies? How will the split companies approach future distribution deals with the likes of Comcast and Charter? How quickly could Comcast and WBD combine their two cable groups into one bigger cable group? Will the split help WBD's stock (it's up Monday — but note that Comcast also spiked when it announced its deal last fall, and has fallen some 20% since)?

Some questions the WBD split can generate may also matter to people who don't care about corporate finance. Such as: What does this mean for the future of CNN — the news channel that's struggling to find a lane in a loud and crowded media environment, but whose brand still has lots of potential value?

But the big takeaway is the obvious takeaway: The people who run the biggest collections of cable TV channels in the country would like someone else to own them. Because every quarter, the number of people who watch those channels and pay for those channels gets smaller.

Like I said late last year: These are garage sales. Maybe someone will want to own shrinking businesses that still throw off lots of cash (paging private equity). But the people who have them now think they'd be better off without them. Buyer beware.

• Elon Musk and Donald Trump are breaking up on social media.
• On the social media they own, that is: Musk is using Twitter and Trump is using Truth Social.
• But it wouldn't matter what platforms they use, or own: When you're this rich, famous and powerful, everything you say or type shows up everywhere, instantly.

It was easy to predict that Elon Musk and Donald Trump would break up someday. Even the dummy typing this imagined it.

What I didn't imagine was that the divorce between two of the most powerful men in the world would play out on rival social platforms.

Musk is tweeting away on the thing many of us still call Twitter — which he owns, of course — and Trump is firing back on Truth Social — the would-be Twitter rival he owns.

First and foremost, the spectacle of two billionaires having a potentially deeply consequential flame war is … truly something. When Jack Dorsey and crew were dreaming up their microblogging service nearly 20 years ago, they weren't dreaming of this.

But the fact that it's happening on two different social networks is also fascinating. And it underscores that "social networks" isn't always the best way to think about these platforms. At least when it comes to their mega-rich, mega-wealthy owners, these things are simply megaphones to holler at the world.

Trump, recall, became a surprisingly effective Twitter troll in the run-up to his first election, and especially once he took office. He became expert at "programming" the news by tapping out a few incendiary lines on his Twitter account, and reveling in the chaos that could create. (The guy typing this made a pretty good podcast about all that.)

Then Twitter banned Trump, which by all accounts deeply upset Trump, and that banishment helped prompt Musk to buy Twitter, and then reinstate Trump.

Why Trump never really came back to Twitter

But in the meantime, Trump had created his own Truth Social network as a Twitter alternative. And Trump has both a legal obligation and a financial imperative to post on Truth Social first.

A license agreement with Trump Media & Technology Group, the company that owns Truth Social, requires Trump to post all "non-political social media" items to Truth Social first, then wait six hours before running them anywhere else. More important: If the guy who owns the social media platform isn't using the social media platform for his social media, why would anyone else use it?

Even after Musk and Trump merged forces last summer, Trump still spent almost no time on Twitter. Instead, he's kept plugging away on Truth Social.

And what's happened since — and especially now — forces us to rethink how these platforms work.

For instance: Lots of people who used to use the platform formerly known as Twitter thought that removing Trump from Twitter would diminish his power. But that obviously wasn't true. Trump crushed all comers in the last Republican primary, and won a meaningful victory in last fall's general election, despite little-to-no presence on Twitter.

More important is that Trump's ability to make the world turn based on his words isn't dependent on Twitter at all. He's the President of the United States, so whatever he says, whenever he says it — on a Truth Social post, on the White House lawn, aboard Air Force One — gets instantly amplified, oftentimes with great consequence. Trump could spout off on Tumblr or Friendster (I just Googled — Friendster still exists) and his message would get out there.

At the same time, Trump's presence on Truth Social doesn't seem to have meaningfully boosted usage on that platform.

We can't measure that with traditional metrics — because, tellingly, Trump Media continues to not provide any metrics about how many people use the service — but on vibes. You may read plenty of stories about how Trump posted something on Truth Social, but what about anyone else?

Meanwhile, the things we can see from Trump Media don't suggest the platform is booming: In 2024, the company's meager revenue line actually declined by 12% over the previous year. Even more telling may be the company's seeming pivot into life as a bitcoin repository — which may turn out to make a lot of money for Trump and his partners, but doesn't suggest a real interest in running a media platform.

And at the same time, a Trump-less Twitter has … I don't know if thrived is the right word. A meaningful number of influential users and big advertisers have left the service, and its financial condition seems hopeful at best.

But despite the rise of would-be challengers, Twitter remains the most prominent place for public, real-time chatter, more or less by default. That's why people who tell you social media isn't great for you still use Twitter when they want to insert themselves into the conversation — like The New York Times' Ezra Klein did last year during crucial points in the election cycle.

That speaks to the stickiness of social networks, and how hard it is to replicate them somewhere else. But again, that isn't relevant to Musk's use of the platform to attack Trump: Musk could print out all of his insults on paper and they'd still carry the same weight and import.

When mega-billionaires speak, people listen

Put it another way: Mark Zuckerberg owns multiple huge social networks. If he were going to join this brawl, it wouldn't matter which one of them he used to come over the top rope. All that would matter is the world's second-richest man was in the fight, too, and anything he said or did would be covered by everyone, everywhere.

So cut to Thursday, when Trump has been calling to cut "Billions and Billions of Dollars" from the federal budget by "terminat[ing] Elon's Governmental Subsidies and Contracts" and Musk is accusing Trump of suppressing embarrassing information about disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein because Trump "is in the Epstein files."

The insults and threats are being lobbed from different platforms — and are at the same time directly responding to each other but also pretending the other one doesn't exist. Like exes who refuse to speak with each other, but spend all their time telling their mutual friends how awful the other one is, knowing it will get back directly to the person they're complaining about.

Except in this case, the exes are two of the most powerful people in the world. So it doesn't matter what platform they use to do it.

• Google stock tumbled Wednesday after Apple's executive Eddy Cue said AI rivals were cutting into the search giant.
• Google responded by saying that's not the case.
• It's possible that both arguments are correct. The stakes are very high.

Is Google screwed?

That's the $2 trillion question the tech world is trying to understand following Wednesday's blockbuster news: A top Apple executive said search queries on the company's Safari browser were declining because people were using AI engines like ChatGPT instead.

Investors immediately acted as if Google's astonishing run at the top of the tech heap was over, and slashed the company's stock by more than 8%.

But a day later, Google's stock was climbing back up a bit, and there's a healthy debate about what Cue's statement means — as well as why he said it.

Spoiler: I'm not going to solve this one today. But let's at least look at the argument.

The most obvious way to view Cue's comments was the way Wall Street did: that Google search dominance was being eroded by AI competitors.

After all, fear of being usurped by AI is what pushed Google to fast-track its own AI efforts, even when some of those efforts created embarrassing results.

But later on Wednesday, Google put out a statement that basically said Cue was wrong, without actually saying that out loud. Instead, the company said it was continuing to see increasing searches, and "that includes an increase in total queries coming from Apple's devices and platforms."

So that looks like two of the world's most powerful and valuable companies are disagreeing over basic, knowable facts.

But people who pay attention to this stuff are focusing on three key words in Google's statement: "total," "devices," and "platforms." And the absence of another word: "Safari."

And that's leading them to translate Google's statement this way: "Maybe Apple really is seeing fewer searches on Safari, the default web browser on iPhones. But you can use Google in other ways on iPhones — namely, via the Google app, but also via Google's own Chrome browser. And people are using those more — enough to counter any decline elsewhere."

Assuming that this translation is accurate, that should reassure Google and its boosters a bit, though not completely: Cue said the searches on Safari were down for the first time ever, and that's not the kind of signal you can just wave away.

And even if Safari Google searchers are really moving to things like the Google app instead, that also underlines the fact that people who used to just type something into their iPhone browser know now they can get results other ways. And there's no reason they couldn't also be searching on Google competitors like ChatGPT.

A Google rep declined to comment; Apple hasn't responded to my request for comment.

Google investors, by the way, don't seem 100% convinced by Google's statement: The stock is up 3% on Thursday, which means Google is still worth 5% less than it was Wednesday morning, when Cue started testifying in the US vs. Google antitrust trial.

Which brings us to the second question Google and Apple watchers are speculating about: Why did Cue say what he said in court, after all?

I'm an Occam's razor guy, so my first take was that Cue answered the questions he was asked in court.

But there's also a 4D chess argument, put forth by folks like MoffettNathanson's analyst Michael Nathanson. It goes like this: Cue has an incentive to portray Google as a wounded animal.

That's because Google pays Apple at least $20 billion a year to make Google the default search engine on Safari (that's the reason Cue has insight into Google's search activity), and a federal judge has already declared that Google has an illegal monopoly in search.

And one of the remedies the judge could push for would be to prevent Google from paying Apple for that valuable real estate — which would mean Apple could lose all of that high-margin revenue.

So, the theory goes, convincing the judge that Google no longer has a stranglehold on search, because of AI competition, might allow those payments to keep flowing after all.

That theory also helps explain Google's muted response on Wednesday night, where the company tried to walk the line between tooting its own horn (which bucks up investors but could damage its legal argument) and acknowledging that it has real competition (which could help Google in court but hurt it in the market).

Which brings us back to where we started: Is Google really starting to lose out to the ChatGPTs of the world, and entering a permanent decline, just like pay-TV networks a decade ago? Or is it holding its own despite the competition? Depending on where you're asking the question, Google might give you a different answer.

Correction: May 8, 2025 — An earlier version of this story misstated which company the Safari browser belongs to. It's Apple, not Google.

• When you see a movie or a TV show, do you think about where it was made?
• Lots of people in Hollywood do — they're seeing more and more productions move outside the US.
• Donald Trump says he wants to reverse that. But his proposal is hard to understand.

There are many stories out right now about Donald Trump's call for a "100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands."

But let's give the concision award to Variety, which noted that Trump's Sunday night announcement generated many questions in Hollywood, "starting with: Huh?"

Let's also note that Trump frequently changes his mind about things, and most definitely about his tariff policies. So it's entirely possible his Hollywood tariff post leads to nada.

While we're throat clearing, let's also note that, unlike some of Trump's other tariff pushes, this one doesn't imagine a world where work that left the US long ago comes back to the country. Movie (and TV) production remains a huge business in the US, employing millions of people.

And lastly, Trump is correct in noting that film (and TV) production has been leaving Hollywood for years. Sometimes it has gone to other places in the US: Disney has made more than a dozen Marvel movies in Georgia. "Sinners," one of the year's biggest movies, was made in Louisiana.

But there's a clear trend in international production, driven by lower labor costs and tax incentives. Production spending in the US fell by 28% between 2021 and 2024, but rose just about everywhere else. "Thunderbolts," Marvel's most recent movie, is also set to be the last one filmed in Georgia for the foreseeable future — most of Marvel's production has moved to London.

So what would Trump's plan do to correct that? No one seems to have any clue.

"Hollywood studio executives scrambled Sunday night to determine what the announcement would mean for their business," The Wall Street Journal reports. "As is often the case with Mr. Trump's declarations on social media, it was not entirely clear what he was talking about," The New York Times deadpans. Stocks of studios and streamers like Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery were down Monday morning.

If you take Trump's post at face value, it does indeed pose all kinds of questions. Like: Would the tariffs apply to American-owned/produced movies, or to movies from studios all over the world? Would it apply to American productions that are mostly filmed in the US but have some scenes shot in other countries? What about movies where some postproduction work, like visual effects, is handled outside the US?

And at the most basic: How, exactly, do you tariff a movie or TV show? They don't arrive in this country via cargo ships or planes. US Customs and Border Protection doesn't sign off on their import.

My sneaking suspicion is that Trump doesn't know, either. It's just that he seems to think tariffs are the solution to just about any problem.

Otherwise, if Trump were truly concerned about encouraging more domestic film (and TV) production, he might go about it the way just about everyone else does: with tax breaks and other financial incentives.

Which, it turns out, is exactly the pitch Trump heard from the actor Jon Voight and his manager, Steven Paul, this weekend, per Bloomberg. Voight — one of three actors Trump said earlier this year would be his "special ambassadors" to bring back work to Hollywood — and Paul spent time with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and suggested a pretty normal plan, Bloomberg says: "more federal tax incentives for US film and TV production," which involves "expanding existing tax credits and bringing back ones that have expired."

Voight and Paul didn't propose tariffs, Bloomberg reports. But Trump did. So here we are. Let's see if it goes anywhere.