December 10, 2025                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

The good news: Paramount’s proposal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery — a move that would have placed conservative mega-donor Larry Ellison’s son in a uniquely powerful perch — fell short last week. The bad news? Netflix now appears poised to gobble up the storied Warner and its film and television studios, HBO and HBO MAX, instead.

This corporate consolidation should be worrying to everyone. Sure, your Netflix subscription may soon grant you access to a deep catalogue of Warner Bros. classics — although we can't promise there won't be a higher monthly fee. But alarm bells are already going off for the future of movie theaters given Netflix’s penchant for only showing its new movies in theaters for a week or skipping theatrical releases entirely.

The drop in competition from the merger, the Directors Guild of America has warned, will likely put a hefty number of jobs in jeopardy.

The Netflix deal, of course, could still unravel. Regulators have to give their okay, and Paramount has already submitted a hostile takeover bid with the help of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. But imagining this administration rejecting some version of this mega acquisition is a considerable stretch. 

Chris Mills Rodrigo
for the Institute for Policy Studies Inequality.org team

Exposing Deadly Conditions for Indonesian Tesla Contractors

This week’s frontline face: Raraa Rahmawati, a labor activist combating deadly working conditions in the Indonesian nickel industry, the world’s largest source of this key component of electric car batteries.  

What she’s doing to help create a more equal world: Rahmawati works with Sembada Bersama, an organization that’s collaborating with nickel-processing workers to document extreme hazards in their workplaces. 

Xiang Guangda, the founder of Chinese nickel processor Tsingshan, has become a mega-billionaire by securing lucrative deals with Tesla and other electric vehicle manufacturers. Meanwhile, Xiang’s Indonesian employees work brutally long shifts and face dangerous levels of chemical and dust exposure. Factory temperatures can climb as high as 108.5 degrees. 

What makes this fight so important to Rahmawati: “People who buy electric cars think they’re contributing to a ‘just transition’ away from fossil fuels,” she noted at a Peoples Summit held parallel to the recent G20 leaders meeting in South Africa. “But they should know this is really extractivism. We need a cross-border movement to stop corporations from putting profits over workers’ lives.” 

A Look at Colorado’s New Tax on the Rich To Pay for Free School Lunches

Colorado voters passed a pair of ballot measures last month that aim to fully fund a new universal school lunch program. The propositions will benefit farmers by allocating dollars for purchasing locally grown food and increase cafeteria worker wages as well. 

To pay for these new lunch initiatives, the adopted ballot measures impose a tax increase on households making more than $300,000 a year, households whose children will also benefit from the new lunch program. 

“It’s a win-win-win,” writes author and TV host Sonali Kolhatkar. 

With Congress slashing federal funding for food assistance and other vital public services, Kolhatkar is urging more cities and states to take similar action. Read more below on the encouraging signs she’s seeing in New York City, New Mexico, Seattle, Boston, and beyond.

Compared to other countries, the United States has seen the largest expansion of its billionaire class here in 2025, according to the just-released UBS Billionaire Ambitions Report. By the Switzerland-based investment bank’s count, the number of American billionaires has risen from 835 in 2024 to 924 in 2025. That total amounts to nearly a third of the world’s billionaire population. 

For an interactive version of this chart and more on global inequality, click the link to our Inequality.org Facts section below.

This Silicon Valley Mover-and-Shaker Has Entered Onto Shaky Ground

This week’s dour deep pocket: David Sacks, the high-tech venture capitalist who has become “Silicon Valley’s undisputed power broker in the White House.”

What has Sacks sour: The charges that he’s personally profiting from the “AI Action Plan” executive order that Donald Trump signed this past summer. Sacks helped write that plan.

Sacks, the New York Times reported late last month, has been working with the White House in a special arrangement that lets him serve without divesting himself from 20 crypto and 449 AI-related investments. The policies he’s pushed at the White House have set these investments up “to flourish.”

The Sacks response to the Times exposé: The Silicon Valley kingpin has called America’s paper of record “a hoax factory” and announced he has hired one of America’s top defamation-suit attorneys to get the paper to “abandon” its published conflict-of-interest charges against him.

The last word: Sacks has become a prime player, notes usual Trump fanboy Steve Bannon, in the “ascendant technocratic oligarchy” that is “leading the White House down the road to perdition.”

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