A Trump threat puts Netflix's board — and its Warner Bros. merger hopes — in the crosshairs

In the middle of a high-stakes media merger, Netflix $NFLX has found itself starring in a different drama: a president demanding a boardroom purge.

Over the weekend, President Donald Trump used his social media megaphone to demand that Netflix fire “racist, Trump Deranged” board member Susan Rice — “IMMEDIATELY” — or “pay the consequences.” He added, “She’s got no talent or skills - Purely a political hack! HER POWER IS GONE, AND WILL NEVER BE BACK. How much is she being paid, and for what???”

Netflix, mind you, isn’t a federal agency. Rice, mind you, isn’t an employee. But the company is in the middle of a takeover fight that needs regulators, and Trump knows what kind of leverage that implies.

On “Stay Tuned with Preet,” Rice, a veteran Democratic foreign-policy official and a long-time Netflix director — the company appointed her to the board in March 2018, she stepped away when she joined the Biden White House, and Netflix reappointed her in 2023 — argued that corporations that “take a knee” to Trump are likely to be “held accountable” when political power swings back. She went further, warning that if companies expect Democrats to “play by the old rules” and “forgive and forget,” they’ve “got another thing coming.”

That kind of rhetoric is catnip for Trump’s favorite storyline: The aggrieved executive-in-chief, surrounded by enemies, forced to fight back.

Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery agreed in December to a merger that values the Warner studio-and-streaming business at $82.7 billion, after Warner spins off its Discovery Global cable operations into a separate company. Warner is already moving toward a shareholder vote on March 20, but Paramount $PARA Skydance is trying to topple the arrangement with a bid for the whole company at around $108.4 billion. Skydance’s bid for Paramount Global is led by CEO David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison, who hosted a Trump fundraiser at his California estate and has publicly backed him. So as one media company absorbs a presidential threat, another is run by a family that doesn’t exactly have to wonder how this White House works.

Warner has given Paramount a seven-day window ending Monday, Feb. 23, to submit a “best and final” offer, one Netflix is allowed to match under the merger agreement.

In that setting, “pay the consequences” doesn’t need a footnote. Everyone in the room knows what it could mean: a tougher antitrust posture, a regulator suddenly discovering religion, a White House that decides the world’s most important streaming app has “a lot of market share.” Trump used those exact words in earlier comments about the Warner deal, calling Netflix “a great company” before adding: “It’s a lot of market share, so we’ll have to see what happens.”

Netflix’s response, so far, has been to act like everything is normal. In a BBC interview, co-CEO Ted Sarandos insisted: “This is a business deal. It’s not a political deal,” adding that the process is run by the Department of Justice and regulators “throughout Europe and around the world.” Meanwhile, board directors are elected by shareholders and governed by company bylaws; removing one typically requires board or shareholder action.

When asked about Trump’s public demand, Sarandos shrugged: “He likes to do a lot of things on social media.”

Sarandos is trying to keep this dispute inside the corporate lane — valuation, vertical integration, the buyer claiming it will “add” to the market rather than hollow it out. Trump is dragging it into the political lane, where the unwritten rule is simple: If the president is talking about your board composition, he’s also talking about your permissions.