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A legal threat from investor Mario Gabelli was a “major factor” in this week’s implosion of Shari Redstone’s $8 billion deal to merge Paramount Global with its “Mission: Impossible” production partner Skydance Media, The Post has learned.

When Redstone made a surprise move to pull the plug on the deal this week — just before a Paramount special committee was poised to vote on it — she was looking down the barrel of a $100 million-plus lawsuit from Gabelli over the deal, according to sources close to the situation.

The 70-year-old media heiress hadn’t been in any recent discussions with Gabelli, who has long been a key Paramount investor, sources close to the situation said.

Nevertheless, other Paramount shareholders had ripped Redstone for seeking a premium for her stock over other that of other Paramount investors.

A rep for Redstone didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

In an exclusive interview with The Post, the 81-year-old billionaire — a self-described “Bronx tough guy” long famous for his savvy media investments — declined to discuss any specifics around prospective litigation over Paramount.

But he also didn’t deny it may have been in the cards.

“Like Teddy Roosevelt said, I speak softly and carry a big stick,” Gabelli said. “We have established a relationship with an attorney and are looking at all of this under a microscope.”

Redstone — daughter of the late media mogul Sumner Redstone — controls Paramount through her 77% stake in National Amusements, a holding company that controls Paramount’s voting shares.

Gabelli, meanwhile, owns more than half of the remaining voting shares — 54% to be exact, according to securities filings.

In addition to Skydance recently slashing its proposed payment for National Amusements to $1.7 billion from more than $2 billion, sources say a sticking point in talks was whether Skydance would indemnify Redstone against potential litigation in the event she didn’t seek shareholder approval for the deal.

Indeed, sources say Gabelli’s legal team was focused on National Amusements — leaving Redstone herself with the lion’s share of the liability.

Redstone’s lawyer reportedly emailed the Paramount special committee Tuesday saying it and Skydance could not agree on outstanding noneconomic terms. Insiders say legal liabilities around the shareholder vote were a major issue.

“People look at Gabelli as an activist and litigator,” said one Wall Street analyst who covers Paramount’s stock.

“Shari and the Paramount special committee know damn well how the vote would have gone if there was an independent vote,” the analyst added.

It wouldn’t be the first time Gabelli extracted his fair share from Redstone in court.

In April last year, shareholders including Gabelli won a $122.5 million settlement over Viacom’s $30 billion merger with CBS — the deal that formed Paramount Global.

Gabelli had griped that Redstone and a Viacom special committee breached their fiduciary duty when they okayed the deal without shareholder approval.

Sources say Gabelli believes the Skydance deal was even worse, given the rich premium Redstone was seeking for her stock.

Insiders say Redstone feared Gabelli’s wrath despite the fact that the voting and common stock would have been consolidated in a shareholder vote on a Skydance merger, curbing Gabelli’s influence.

Now, Redstone is reportedly exploring a sale of National Amusements to bidders including Edgar Bronfman Jr. rather than selling all of Paramount.

“One possible theory of what’s going on is if she cuts a deal to sell part of National Amusements, there is no litigation,” Gabelli said.

That’s not necessarily a safe bet, either. According to sources, Bronfman is weighing a plan to split Paramount Global’s streaming business from its low-growth cable channels, saddling the latter with the company’s debt.

Technically, Redstone wouldn’t need shareholder approval for a National Amusements sale.

But if a buyer then moved to make changes at Paramount Global, it could trigger shareholder objections over change of control provisions, sources said.

“If she attempts to sell NAI, we have six months to figure out if it is a change of control while the FCC examines the deal,” Gabelli said.

In an exclusive April interview with The Post, Gabelli said he’d rather see no sale.

Despite fears over the media giant’s debt load, malaise at movie theaters and cable TV cord-cutting, Gabelli said he likes its prospects as it slashes costs and grows its Paramount+ streaming service.

That’s a position he reiterated this week.

Gabelli said he believes the streaming business including Paramount+ will surge in value to $19 billion in 2027 from $13 billion this year.

The film business, he projects, also will more than double in value from $830 million to $1.7 billion in three years.

“We’re marathon runners and looking at Paramount from a long-term ownership position,” Gabelli told The Post.

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Politics

Government delays child poverty strategy – leaving tens of thousands facing hardship

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Government delays child poverty strategy - leaving tens of thousands facing hardship

The two-child benefit cap has been a raw nerve for the Labour party since long before they came to power.

It’s become increasingly exposed amid internal party divisions over the government’s forthcoming welfare reforms, which are expected to push another 250,000 people into poverty, including 50,000 children.

Lifting the cap could raise up to 350,000 children out of poverty, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

A left-wing rebellion over the issue just weeks after the general election saw seven of the party’s MPs lose the whip.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer leaves 10 Downing Street in London, Britain, May 21, 2025. REUTERS/Hannah McKay
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The PM has previously suggested he’d like to lift the two-child benefit cap. Pic: Reuters.

But in a bid to show he was still committed to tackling the problem – while also kicking the ball down the road – Keir Starmer set up a child poverty taskforce, which promised to look at policies to tackle the “root causes” of the issue. That taskforce was due to report in the “spring” – which should be any day now.

But now, as first reported by the Guardian, the Department of Work and Pensions has confirmed it has decided to push back publication until later in the year, to ensure its “ambitious child poverty strategy” can deliver “fully funded measures”.

I understand that means the announcements will be made as part of the autumn statement – and it looks like the prime minister is now backing a change on the cap.

Sir Keir Starmer and Welsh First Minister Eluned Morgan. Pic: Eluned Morgan/X
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Welsh First Minister Eluned Morgan met with Sir Keir on Friday. Pic: Eluned Morgan/X

Welsh First Minister Eluned Morgan told Sky News on Friday that the issue was brought up by “lots” of attendees of a meeting of regional mayors and first ministers, and the PM said they’d “like to see some movement – it’s about when and how”.

Scrapping the two-child benefit cap is seen by charities as the most effective way of pulling children out of poverty. But doing so will come at a cost, estimated to be some £2.5bn.

The prime minister has previously suggested he would like to lift the cap, but only when the fiscal situation allows. This promise was one of the government’s key public declarations of responsibility to the financial markets.

But this week he’s signalled he’s prepared to U-turn over the other flashpoint policy – means testing the winter fuel allowance.

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Under pressure from concerned MPs and activists riled up by thousands of angry doorstep conversations during their recent local election debacle, he is prepared to move.

He’s justified that change by arguing it was right to look again at the measure “as the economy improves”. But if that’s the case – why not do the same for children as for pensioners?

Charities estimate the two-child benefit cap pushes another 100 children into poverty every day, which would affect another 20,000 by the time of the budget.

Some Labour MPs are prepared to criticise the delay publicly. Neil Duncan-Jordan told me: “Millions of families will be devastated by the delay in tackling the scandal of child poverty… the need to act is now.”

But others, including Helen Barnard, from the Trussell Trust charity, have argued the delay might not be such a bad thing, posting on X: “This may be good news. Better a delayed child poverty strategy with measures to really protect children from hunger and hardship than one hitting the deadline but falling short on substance.”

It’s unclear how the government would fund such a change. This week, former PM Gordon Brown told Sky News’ Sophy Ridge they should be looking at a gambling tax to find the cash.

By giving ground now on winter fuel and hints on child benefit, Sir Keir may be hoping to head off the fermenting rebellion on his planned welfare cuts.

But those MPs angry about welfare cuts are also incensed about child poverty – and today’s news will likely only embolden their resistance.

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Technology

Elon Musk’s X temporarily down for tens of thousands of users

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Elon Musk's X temporarily down for tens of thousands of users

Elon Musk looks on as U.S. President Donald Trump meets South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 21, 2025.

Kevin Lamarque | Reuters

The Elon Musk-owned social media platform X experienced a brief outage on Saturday morning, with tens of thousands of users reportedly unable to use the site.

About 25,000 users reported issues with the platform, according to the analytics platform Downdetector, which gathers data from users to monitor issues with various platforms.

Roughly 21,000 users reported issues just after 8:30 a.m. ET, per the analytics platform.

The issues appeared to be largely resolved by around 9:55 a.m., when about 2,000 users were reporting issues with the platform.

Read more CNBC politics coverage

X did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Additional information on the outage was not available.

Musk, the billionaire owner of SpaceX and Tesla, acquired X, formerly known as Twitter in 2022.

The site has had a number of widespread outages since the acquisition.

The site experienced another outage in March, which Musk attributed at the time to a “massive cyberattack.”

“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” Musk wrote in a post at the time.

This is breaking news. Check back for updates

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Environment

Republicans won’t defeat EVs – but in fighting them, may kill US auto industry

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Republicans won't defeat EVs - but in fighting them, may kill US auto industry

Republicans launched multiple attacks against EVs, clean air and American jobs this week, at the behest of the oil industry that funds them. These attacks won’t be successful, and EVs will continue to grow regardless, and inevitably take over for outdated gasoline vehicles.

However, these republican attacks on EVs will still have some effect: they will diminish the US auto industry globally, leading to job losses and surrendering one of the jewels in the crown of American industry to China, where there is no similar effort to destroy its own domestic EV industry.

Republican attacks on clean air this week included moves to block funding that has led to a renaissance in US manufacturing and also to illegally block clean air laws. They also moved forward with a procedural step towards increasing US fuel costs by $23B, an effort which the former reality TV contestant posing as the head of the DOT announced in January.

These moves shouldn’t be a big surprise – republicans have opposed clean air and American jobs for many years now, and they’re doing it because they want to maintain the bribes they get from the oil industry.

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But they should inspire worry for Americans, because they will only harm the country’s domestic manufacturing base in the face of a changing auto industry.

Republicans keep trying to kill clean cars

The last time a republican occupied the the White House, we saw similar efforts to try to raise fuel and health costs for Americans, and to block superior EV technology from flourishing. That didn’t work in the end, and EVs continued to grow both during that period and after.

All the while, fossil fuels have maintained their privileged policy position, being allowed to pollute with impunity and costing the US $760 billion per year in externalized costs. Much of that subsidy is accounted for in the cost of pollution from gas cars, which are one of the primary uses of fossil fuels, which means that, in fact, gasoline vehicles receive much more subsidy than EVs do.

And yet, EVs still managed to grow substantially, despite these headwinds. EV sales have continued to grow, both in the US and globally, even as headlines incorrectly say otherwise. The republican party’s attempts to kill them were futile, and will continue to be.

It didn’t work, but it did delay progress

However, anti-EV actions from Mr. Trump and the republican party did manage to delay progress from where it could have been if America actually instituted smart industrial policy earlier.

What if, instead of the bumbling, idiotic nonsense we went through the last time Mr. Trump squatted in the White House, we could have had something more like President Biden’s EV policy, which created hundreds of thousands of jobs and attracted hundreds of billions of dollars of manufacturing investment?

Surely the American auto industry would be ahead of where it is now if those investments had had time to come online. But instead, republicans are currently trying to kill those jobs, which has already led to several manufacturing projects being cancelled this year, depriving Americans of the economic boost they need right now.

Meanwhile, there’s one place that this sort of stumbling isn’t happening: China.

China is taking advantage

China has spent more than a decade focusing on securing material supply, building refining capacity, developing their own battery technology, and encouraging local EV manufacturing startups.

This has paid off recently, as Chinese EVs have been rapidly scaling in production in recent years. It took a lot of the auto industry by surprise how rapidly Chinese companies have scaled, and how rapidly Chinese consumers have adopted them, after having an initially slow start.

But that adoption hasn’t just been local, it’s also global. Last year, China became the largest auto exporter in the world, taking a crown that Japan had held for decades. But the change was even more dramatic than that – as recently as 2020, China was the sixth-largest auto exporter in the world, just behind the US in 5th place.

China’s dramatic turn upward started in 2020, and now it’s in first place. Meanwhile, because of all the faffing about, the US remains exactly where it was in 2020 – still in fifth place. Well, sixth now, since China eclipsed us (and everyone else).

Tariffs won’t fix it

The reaction of the rest of the world’s automaking countries has been to put tariffs on Chinese autos, hoping to forestall the country’s dramatic rise to dominance. (Although, due to Mr. Trump’s idiotic flailing, Europe is already talking about removing these trade barriers with China)

But tariffs have been tried before, and they didn’t work. When Japan had a similarly meteoric rise to global prominence as an auto manufacturer in the 1970s and 80s, largely due to their adoption of new technology, processes, and different car styles which incumbents were ignoring, the US tried to stop it with tariffs.

All this did was make US manufacturers complacent, and Japan still managed to seize and maintain the crown of top auto exporter (occasionally trading places with Germany) from then until now.

Then as now, the true way to compete is to adapt to the changing automotive industry and take EVs seriously, rather than giving the auto industry excuses to be complacent. But instead, republicans aren’t doing that, and in fact are working to ensure the American auto industry doesn’t adapt, by actively killing the incentives that were leading to a boom in domestic manufacturing investment.

US auto industry jeopardized by republicans

Make no mistake about it: destroying EV incentives, and allowing companies to pollute more and innovate less, will not help the US auto industry catch up with a fast moving competitor.

As we at Electrek have said for years, you cannot catch up to a competitor that is both ahead of you and moving faster than you.

This applies to individual companies, which took their sweet time responding to the challenge from electric upstarts like Tesla, and have now lost market share to said upstarts and let a competitor establish itself in a big way (even though Tesla’s CEO is now trying desperately to harm his own company specifically, and the US EV industry as a whole, by being the largest funder of the party working to destroy said industry).

It also applies to nations, which could have spent the last decade doing what the Chinese auto industry has been doing, but instead non-Chinese automakers have been begging their governments for more time, even though it’s not the regulations that threaten them, it’s competition from a new and motivated rival that is moving faster and in a more determined manner towards the future.

The way that we get around this should be clear: take EVs seriously.

But that’s not what republicans are doing, and in doing so, they are signing the death warrant for an important US industry in the long term.


Another thing republicans are trying to kill is the the rooftop solar credit, which means you could have only until the end of this year to install rooftop solar on your home before the cost of doing so goes up by an average of ~$10,000. So if you want to go solar, get started now, because these things take time and the system needs to be active before you file for the credit.

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