[akira2501]

The CBS Viacom merger was a cynical plan from the very beginning. It even drew shareholder lawsuits which they ultimately had to settle. The writing was on the wall as early as 2015, though, when the company started restructuring several core businesses in moves that I saw at the time as "thinly veiled cash grabs."

During a time when they could have been making deeper investments in these business and capturing large parts of a growing media market they completely ceded the space and any expertise they had in it all to pad their own paper value. Immediately after the merger they lost a lot of licensing revenue because they drastically overestimated the value of the corporate assets they cherry picked for themselves.