Skydance Corporation Valuation 2026: The $110 Billion Price Tag Is an Enterprise Value, Not a Market Cap

$110 billion is Skydance Corporation's enterprise value after it completed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery on October 6, 2026 — a number struck back in February, not re-priced at closing, and an enterprise value rather than a market capitalization.

Ellison-controlled Skydance completed its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery on October 6, 2026, closing a deal first struck eight months earlier and clearing the last of its regulatory hurdles, according to The Information. The combined company's Class B shares stopped trading on Nasdaq under the ticker PSKY at Friday's close and began trading Tuesday on the New York Stock Exchange under the new ticker SKYD, with the corporate entity renamed Skydance Corporation.

Skydance Corporation valuation 2026: an enterprise value, not a market cap

Skydance Corporation's roughly $110 billion price tag is an enterprise value — equity value plus the net debt it took on — not a public market capitalization discovered by trading. Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery signed their definitive merger agreement on February 27, 2026, a day after Netflix abruptly withdrew from the bidding war for WBD's studio and streaming assets, according to NBC News. The agreement set a $31-per-share cash offer for WBD, valuing the deal at roughly $110.9 billion in enterprise terms — equity value of about $77 billion plus WBD's outstanding debt.

That figure held through closing. Nothing in Tuesday's completion re-struck the price: the $110 billion number investors see today is the same enterprise value negotiated eight months ago, carried forward through a shareholder vote, regulatory review in multiple jurisdictions, and a UK scrutiny threat that ultimately did not block the transaction.

How Skydance got from a $28B merger to a $110B one in 14 months

This is Ellison's second major media merger in just over a year, and the enterprise value roughly quadrupled between the two deals. Skydance Media merged with Paramount Global first, in a transaction that closed August 7, 2025 after FCC approval on July 24, 2025, creating Paramount Skydance with an enterprise value of approximately $28 billion and a Nasdaq listing under PSKY, per Lexpert. That entity then turned around seven months later and struck the much larger WBD deal.

Sources: Lexpert on the August 2025 Paramount-Skydance close; NBC News on the February 2026 WBD agreement; Skydance Corporation's Form 8-K on the warrant distribution and closing. The deal closed six days after its original Q3 2026 target.

Why Netflix walked away with $2.8 billion and what a blocked deal would have cost

Netflix had been a bidder for WBD's studio and streaming assets before pulling out of the process on February 26, 2026, a day before Paramount Skydance and WBD announced their agreement. Under the terms of that withdrawal, Netflix is entitled to a $2.8 billion termination fee, per NBC News' reporting on the signed agreement. The Paramount Skydance-WBD contract separately included a $7 billion reverse termination fee payable to WBD if regulators had blocked the transaction — a structure that reflects how seriously both sides weighed the antitrust and foreign-investment risk in a deal this size, especially after the UK signaled early on that it might scrutinize the transaction.

Neither contingency triggered. UK regulators ultimately did not intervene, state attorneys general extracted settlement commitments on the Paramount-Skydance leg of the deal rather than blocking it, and the WBD acquisition cleared its last hurdle in time for the October 6 close.

How $110 billion stacks up against Netflix and Disney

Skydance Corporation's enterprise value is a fraction of its two largest streaming-era rivals by market value, though the comparison mixes two different measures: enterprise value (equity plus net debt) for Skydance versus plain market capitalization for its peers, since neither Netflix nor Disney has gone through a going-private-style transaction that would price their own enterprise value the same way. Stock-data aggregator TIKR put Netflix's market cap at roughly $387.6 billion and Disney's at roughly $182.6 billion as of May 1, 2026 — both numbers that move daily with their share prices, unlike Skydance's fixed deal price.

Skydance's enterprise value is roughly 60% of Disney's market cap and well under a third of Netflix's — though an EV-to-market-cap comparison is approximate, not apples-to-apples.

What else is moving in media M&A

Skydance's close lands in the middle of an unusually active stretch for media consolidation, though not every major player is betting the same way. Comcast is separately splitting itself into two public companies, spinning off NBCUniversal and Sky as a standalone entity — the opposite bet from Ellison's, that scale is a liability rather than an asset in a post-cable world. Netflix and Disney, by contrast, have avoided major M&A of their own this cycle, instead investing organically in streaming.

The new Warner Bros. Discovery now sits inside a single corporate parent above Paramount Pictures, with Paramount+ and HBO Max continuing to operate as separate consumer brands for now, even though combining the two streaming services was reportedly part of the original merger agreement, per NBC News.

What the headline misses

Closing the deal does not retire its financing. Both the Paramount-Skydance merger and the WBD acquisition were funded with substantial new debt, and Skydance now carries the combined leverage of two large media balance sheets into a business that is still losing linear-TV subscribers every quarter — a fact an enterprise-value headline doesn't surface. Integration risk is real too: merging Paramount's and Warner's studio operations, legal teams, and distribution contracts is a multi-year project, and the UK's earlier intervention threat shows regulators elsewhere could still revisit specific business lines even after close.

This likely means the $110 billion figure should be read as a deal price, not a verdict on how the combined company will trade once investors can assess integration progress and debt service costs directly through SKYD's share price — that is inference based on the leverage involved, not a projection Skydance has made itself.

What to watch next

Skydance's SEC filing around the listing transfer describes the warrant distribution to shareholders of record as of October 5, 2026, at a ratio of one warrant per Class B share, with the warrants trading separately on the NYSE starting around the October 6 ex-date. Lawrence J. Ellison, David F. Ellison, Gerald J. Cardinale, affiliated trusts, and RedBird Capital Partners Fund IV are excluded from the distribution — a mechanic worth tracking for anyone holding the stock through the transition.

Beyond that, the real test is whether Ellison moves to combine HBO Max and Paramount+ into one streaming product, as NBC News reported was part of the original merger agreement, and whether the new Skydance uses its combined content library to renegotiate AI-licensing terms with platforms training models on video — the fight both chipmaker-scale and media-scale companies are increasingly having at once.