Techmeme
December 5, 2025, 4:30 PM

Top News

Daniel Thomas / Financial Times:
Netflix agrees to acquire WBD's studios and streaming business in an $82.7B cash-and-stock deal, including debt, to close after WBD splits in two in Q3 2026  —  Deal will transform US tech company into the dominant player in Hollywood  —  Netflix has agreed an $83bn takeover of Warner Bros Discovery …
More: About Netflix, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Deadline, Associated Press, Business Insider, Reuters, Benzinga, Wall Street Journal, The Verge, Fortune, The Times, Los Angeles Times, Adweek, The Wrap, CNN, New York Times, TVNewsCheck, today.rtl.lu, USA Today, Blaze Media, LinkedIn, mxdwn Television, Bounding Into Comics, The Daily Signal, Daily Star, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren …, Barchart.com, New York Post, MediaPost, Breitbart, Al Jazeera, Quartz, The Information, The Shortcut, The Daily Caller, CNN, and CNBC
Tony Maglio / The Hollywood Reporter:
Netflix says it “expects to maintain Warner Bros.' theatrical releases for films” but “the windows will evolve to be much more consumer friendly”  —  Now that that's settled...  Netflix just solidified itself as the leading entertainment company (and then some), and all it cost was $83 billion.
Chris Kerr / Game Developer:
WBD confirms that Warner Bros. Games will be acquired by Netflix along with its wider streaming and television business  —  A Warner Bros. spokesperson has confirmed the video game division will be acquired by Netflix alongside its wider streaming and television business.
Bloomberg:
Netflix has lined up a $59B unsecured bridge loan from Wells Fargo, BNP Paribas, and HSBC to support its WBD deal, one of the largest ever loans of its kind  —  Netflix Inc. has lined up $59 billion of financing from Wall Street banks to help support its planned acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. …
More: Inc.com, Mercury News, Yahoo Finance, and Variety
LinkedIn: Paula SeligsonBluesky: @bdsams.com, @kerrblimey, and @danny.pageForums: r/xbox
Foo Yun Chee / Reuters:
The EU fines X €120M for breaching online content rules, the first fine under the DSA, citing issues like its deceptive blue checkmarks, after a two-year probe  —  Elon Musk's social media company X was fined 120 million euros ($140 million) by EU tech regulators on Friday …
Liv McMahon / BBC:
Vice President JD Vance, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr denounce the EU's €120M X fine  —  The EU has fined Elon Musk's social media platform X €120m (£105m) over its blue tick badges - prompting an angry reaction from the US.
New York Times:
The New York Times sues Perplexity, claiming the AI startup violated its copyrights and kept using its content despite repeated demands over the past 18 months  —  Filed in federal court on Friday, the suit joins more than 40 other court disputes between copyright holders and A.I. companies.
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: SpaceX is planning a secondary share sale that would value the company at $800B, surpassing OpenAI to make it the most valuable US private company  —  Company's CFO told investors about the transaction in recent days, sources say  —  SpaceX is kicking off a secondary share sale …
Rose Henderson / Bloomberg:
Cloudflare says it has fixed an issue that caused a 25 minute outage on Friday, following a major, hours-long outage last month  —  Cloudflare Inc. said it has fixed a problem that led to the websites for several banks, Shopify, Zoom and LinkedIn to go down Friday.
Echo Wang / Reuters:
Meta acquires Limitless, which makes a pendant-style AI wearable that records and transcribes real-world conversations; Limitless has raised more than $33M  —  Meta (META.O) has acquired AI-wearables startup Limitless, maker of a pendant-style device that records and transcribes real-world conversations …
Sara Fischer / Axios:
Meta strikes commercial AI data deals with news publishers, including CNN, Fox News, and The Daily Caller, to provide real-time answers in its Meta AI chatbot  —  Meta on Friday said it has struck several commercial AI data agreements with news publishers ranging from USA Today, People Inc. …
Casey Newton / Platformer:
An overview of the five years of Meta's Oversight Board, whose rulings on the relatively small number of cases that it hears have generally had limited impact  —  Five years after the Oversight Board's creation, few are satisfied with the result.  Can it be saved?
A.J. Vicens / Reuters:
US and Canadian agencies warn that Chinese hackers are using Brickstorm malware to penetrate and maintain backdoor access to unnamed government and IT entities  —  Chinese-linked hackers used sophisticated malware to penetrate and maintain long-term access to unnamed government …
Kif Leswing / CNBC:
Hugging Face:
Hugging Face details how it used its new tool, Skills, to fine tune an LLM using Claude, including for writing scripts, submitting jobs to cloud GPUs, and more  —  We gave Claude the ability to fine-tune language models using a new tool called Hugging Face Skills.
Reuters:
Sources and docs: India is considering forcing phone makers to enable always-on satellite location tracking; Apple, Google, and Samsung have opposed the move  —  India's government is reviewing a telecom industry proposal to force smartphone firms to enable satellite location tracking …
About Amazon:
AWS unveils its 192-core Graviton5 chip, with an up to 25% better compute performance than Graviton4, and says Graviton makes up 50%+ of AWS' new CPU capacity  —  Fifth generation chip provides the best price performance for a broad range of workloads in Amazon EC2.  —  Key takeaways

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cape:
Most carriers track everything.  Cape doesn't.  —  Unlimited talk, text & data, 24-hr metadata deletion, network ID rotation, SIM-attack defense, and more.  Switch today and get 29% off for life.
Zoho:
Introducing Zoho Expense Integrated Travel solution : The Smarter Way to Manage Business Travel  —  Business travel has become increasingly complex.  Employees expect consumer-grade booking experiences …
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Great Chat:
Tech's short-term era
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
Access:
Meet the most AI-pilled CEO on Earth
A show about the tech industry's inside conversation, hosted by tech reporter Alex Heath and founder whisperer Ellis Hamburger.
Subscribe to Access.
The Upstarts Podcast:
Basis's Matt Harpe: Why AI Won't Replace Accountants — It'll Make Them Richer
Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
Lucas Shaw on Warner Bros' Limbo, Netflix's Anxiety, and Hollywood's Sort-of Comeback
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Big Technology Podcast:
How China Caught U.S. AI — With Grace Shao
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 4:30 PM ET, December 5, 2025.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Nicole Sperling / New York Times:
Google Research:

Earlier Picks

Wall Street Journal:
Boaz Sobrado / Forbes:
Will Oremus / Washington Post:
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: