I spent a few minutes yesterday looking at Paramount's SEC (stock market) legally required filings. They started this year with $3.4 billion less cash than they had in January 2022. They have less than $2 bn in cash of any type. That means they could, conceivably - not be able to pay bills. Their debt service is gigantic and is the reason for their operational troubles. They filed that they intended to sell Simon & Schuster in 2020 - on or about the time of the initial announcements of the pandemic. They initially wanted to do the merger, which was prohibited. This is a shadow purchase - it's unlikely that the PE firm KKR has any genuine business interest in books of any type.

I know you responded to what I had said about things being illegal vs. "anyone with $ can do whatever they want" - that is 100% the case in the US right now. This has mostly been true; there was just a brief period after WW2 where there was some type of ethics or morality introduced - for example, I learned that Frances Oldham Kelsey, a scientist with the FDA, refused to approve the birth defect causing drug thalidomide whereas it had been approved in Europe. That's one of the last times any substance was banned in the US first and before EU - ever since, many substances, drugs, and practices are not permitted in Europe. Here? It's all about money. And these businesses have truly lost sight of where the money comes from. There is no capacity of any decision-makers to work together except to form plans to steal.