Aryeh Bourkoff’s LionTree Has a Stake in Hollywood’s Merger Era

Beyond the Hollywood executives choosing scripts and greenlighting projects, one banker works behind the scenes to help shape who owns the studios in the first place. Aryeh Bourkoff, founder and CEO of global investment and merchant banking firm LionTree, has his fingerprints on deals involving Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, MGM and more. Since its founding in 2012, LionTree has advised on more than 300 transactions across media, telecommunications and technology totaling more than $1 trillion in collective value.

Bourkoff and his team advised Paramount Global on its merger with Skydance Media and subsequently served as financial advisers to Paramount Skydance on its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which closed Oct. 6. The deal, valued at roughly $110 billion including debt, consolidated Paramount, Warner Bros., HBO, CNN and CBS under a single corporate umbrella renamed Skydance Corporation.

But LionTree did more than help negotiate the transaction. A LionTree-advised investment fund also participated in the deal’s $47 billion equity financing, alongside investors including the Ellison family, RedBird Capital Partners and sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and Qatar. The Ellison family and RedBird retained 100 percent of the combined company’s voting shares, while other investors received nonvoting Class B common stock.

LionTree did not disclose how much its fund committed to the transaction. But a May regulatory filing reported nearly $1.57 billion in gross assets for LionTree Investment Fund, L.P., one of several funds managed by LionTree Investment Management. The figure does not represent the firm’s contribution to Skydance, but it offers a glimpse of the capital managed within Bourkoff’s investment business.

That dual role is increasingly central to LionTree’s appeal. Bourkoff’s firm can advise companies on mergers and acquisitions while affiliated funds invest in businesses and industries where it sees opportunities for growth. The overlap also raises questions about how the firm separates its advisory and investment responsibilities.

LionTree did not respond to a request for comment before publication.

Over the years, Bourkoff has helped shape the ownership and financing structures behind conglomerates that determine what content gets made and who gets to make it. As consolidation accelerates, his firm is positioned on both sides of the industry’s transformation: advising companies as they reshape their businesses and, in some cases, investing in what comes next.

“It goes back to adaptability,” Bourkoff said on The Tim Ferriss Show in 2022. “If something has a rigid purpose and you break the purpose, it will die.”

The new economics of media

As streaming and digital content reshape legacy media, the companies financing entertainment continue to redraw the industry’s boundaries.

The pressure is evident even among streaming’s strongest players. Netflix, which reported 12 percent year-over-year revenue growth in the second quarter, announced plans to eliminate roughly 1,000 positions on Oct. 14, or about 6 percent of its workforce. Most of the cuts affect its technology, product, legal and human-resources operations.

Meanwhile, viewers have shown little hesitation about abandoning subscriptions. In its 2026 Digital Media Trends survey, Deloitte found that 41 percent of U.S. consumers had canceled a paid streaming service during the preceding six months. Twenty-two percent of all respondents had canceled and subsequently returned to the same service during that period.

For media companies, consolidation offers one possible answer to those pressures. By combining libraries, subscribers, advertising operations and production resources, executives hope to cut costs and compete more effectively for audiences.

Fox Corporation, for example, announced a $22 billion agreement to acquire Roku in June, combining its sports, news and entertainment programming with the streaming platform’s distribution and advertising technology. The transaction, which did not involve LionTree as an adviser, is expected to close in 2027.

Regulators have also opened another route toward consolidation. In August, the Federal Communications Commission voted to eliminate the longstanding 39 percent national audience-reach cap for broadcast television station owners, replacing the blanket restriction with case-by-case reviews. The change does not apply to all media companies, but it could allow larger broadcast station groups to emerge.

Not every consequential transaction involves two entertainment giants, however. In September, Canadian holding company Tiny hired LionTree to explore the sale of its 60 percent controlling stake in Letterboxd, the social platform where moviegoers log, review and recommend films.

The platform could fetch more than $300 million, with A24, Sony Pictures and The New York Times among the reported prospective buyers. For a firm accustomed to multibillion-dollar transactions, the assignment is relatively small. But its appeal illustrates how valuable a devoted audience can become to studios and publishers trying to reach younger consumers.

A24 itself has been exploring the intersection of technology and filmmaking. In June, Google reportedly invested about $75 million in the independent studio as part of a partnership to develop A.I.-powered filmmaking tools, prompting criticism from parts of the creative community. The investment and A24’s reported interest in Letterboxd are separate developments, but both reflect an industry increasingly concerned with how films are made, distributed and discovered.

For Skydance, the challenge is considerably larger. David Ellison plans to combine HBO Max and Paramount+ into a single streaming service over time, while the newly merged company faces approximately $79 billion in debt and aims to achieve at least $6 billion in annualized cost savings within three years.

Critics argue that such financial obligations could come at the expense of creativity. In a July report opposing the merger, researchers from the Media and Consolidation Research Organization Lab warned that reduced competition would leave companies with “less motivation to make bold, innovative decisions in storytelling.” Their concern was that Skydance, under pressure to reduce debt, would increasingly favor familiar characters, storylines and genres.

Skydance executives have argued that the combined company’s scale will strengthen competition, expand consumer choice and allow for greater investment in content. The company has committed to producing at least 30 theatrical films annually.

Whether those ambitions can coexist with the financial demands of the acquisition remains to be seen. For Bourkoff, whose family connection to documentary filmmaking extends beyond his work as a banker, the question of what the new media economy means for creative work is hardly an abstract one.

Bourkoff’s track record

The Skydance acquisition may be LionTree’s most prominent recent transaction, but it’s only a fraction of the firm’s reach.

Bourkoff founded LionTree after spending 13 years at UBS, where he rose to become vice chairman and head of Americas investment banking. Since striking out on his own, he has helped build a firm that competes with established media advisers such as Allen & Company, host of the famed Sun Valley Conference, and The Raine Group, known for its sports and entertainment transactions.

Bourkoff’s relationship with Warner Bros. predates the latest merger. In 2022, LionTree advised AT&T when it spun off WarnerMedia to combine the business with Discovery. AT&T received approximately $40.4 billion in cash and through WarnerMedia’s retention of certain debt, while its shareholders received a 71 percent stake in the newly created Warner Bros. Discovery.

That same year, LionTree advised MGM on its $8.45 billion sale to Amazon, bringing the studio’s film and television library, including the James Bond franchise, into the tech giant’s entertainment business.

More recently, Bourkoff’s firm served as exclusive financial adviser to Vox Media on a June agreement to combine several of its publishing brands with Penske Media Corporation. The transaction brought titles including The Verge, Eater and SB Nation together with Penske’s sprawling portfolio, which includes Rolling Stone, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.

LionTree has also established a foothold in sports, an increasingly valuable corner of the entertainment business. The firm advised The Athletic on its $550 million sale to The New York Times in 2022, helping the newspaper expand its subscription offerings beyond traditional news coverage.

Its investment activities extend into the technologies serving sports broadcasters, too. In 2023, LionTree led an investor group that acquired a majority stake in Transmit.Live, an advertising technology company that helps networks and streaming platforms generate revenue from live programming. The undisclosed investment reportedly valued Transmit.Live at approximately $350 million.

The opportunity is substantial. According to S&P Global Market Intelligence, U.S. television and streaming sports media rights payments were projected to reach $29.25 billion in 2025, accounting for more than half of the global sports rights total.

The latest Skydance acquisition brought CBS Sports and TNT Sports under the same corporate umbrella, further concentrating valuable sports programming within an industry whose rights costs continue to rise.

Bourkoff’s reach extends into digital audio as well. LionTree Partners was an investor in Gimlet Media before Spotify acquired the podcast producer in 2019, part of the streaming company’s roughly $340 million purchase of Gimlet and Anchor. The investment helped give LionTree exposure to a growing sector beyond traditional film and television distribution.

Beyond the balance sheets, Bourkoff has his own connection to the creative side of the business. His mother, documentary filmmaker Vivienne Roumani, directed The Last Jews of Libya (2007) and Out of Print (2013), both of which Bourkoff helped produce. The latter, narrated by Meryl Streep, examines how the digital age has transformed publishing and the written word.

At the end of 2025, Bourkoff reflected on a media landscape in which “legacy structures gave way to emergent platforms.” The common thread, he wrote, was companies and investors seeking equilibrium in new arrangements of ownership, partnership, technology and strategy.

He also offered a caution that could apply to the very conglomerates his firm helps assemble: bigger and more complicated doesn’t necessarily mean better.

For LionTree, the distinction may become more consequential as Hollywood’s consolidation continues. Bourkoff has helped companies combine their businesses, acquire competitors and find new sources of capital. Increasingly, his firm can also participate financially in the results.

Whether those larger companies give audiences better stories and creators greater opportunity, or simply leave Hollywood with fewer decision-makers and more debt, is a question the bankers cannot settle at the negotiating table.