Netflix offered $82.7 billion to buy Warner Bros. Discovery in December 2025. By February, the deal was dead. Paramount Skydance swooped in with $110 billion, backed by Larry Ellison's personal guarantee of $45.7 billion in equity. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos called the new price irrational. But that's not the story that stuck. Instead, it's that a Republican congressman used the men's room at Netflix headquarters, found a basket of tampons.

1. The Tampons Killed It (OutKick, Rep. Jason Smith, GOP Lawmakers)

Netflix proved it was a woke company in the one place you can't spin: the bathroom.

Rep. Jason Smith, chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, was "shocked and disturbed" after finding tampons in the men's restroom. He was there during a GOP delegation's visit to Netflix's LA headquarters — a visit intended to reassure Republicans that Netflix wasn't a "left-wing company." Conservative outlets ran with it.

The Senate hearing three weeks earlier had already set the stage. Sen. Eric Schmitt told Sarandos that Netflix has created "the wokest content in the history of the world." While Josh Hawley demanded to know why so much Netflix content promoted transgenderism.

2. Netflix Got Outbid, Period (Sarandos, Bipartisan Antitrust Coalition)

The deal died because Paramount offered $30 billion more. Everything else is noise.

Paramount's price was just too high. Sarandos called David Ellison's winning bid "unusual" and "irrational." Sarandos also said that Trump didn't actually care about the deal; Trump wanted CNN's political influence, not Netflix's streaming catalog.

The antitrust headwinds were bipartisan, not partisan. The DOJ's Antitrust Division issued demands. Eleven state attorneys general called on DOJ to block the deal. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Richard Blumenthal raised their own concerns. Movie theater groups were angry too. This wasn't a culture war -- it was a classic antitrust fight.

Netflix walked away with $2.8 billion in breakup fees. That's not a company that got bullied out of a deal. That's a company that decided the math didn't work.

3. This Was Political From the Start, Not Only About Tampons (Democratic Lawmakers, Bloomberg)

Sarandos walked out of a White House meeting and immediately dropped the bid. That timing isn't a coincidence.

Dems want to know what happened in the Trump meeting. The timing is hard to ignore: Sarandos walked away "minutes after leaving a White House meeting with President Trump."

David Ellison's advantage wasn't just money -- it was access. Bloomberg reported that Ellison leveraged "political ties" to win the bidding war, and that the Ellisons have "warm ties to Trump world." That's not a financial argument. That's a political one.

The culture war hearing was the preview. The culture war at the hearing showed that this was about Washington mad at Silicon Valley and woke culture. In a hearing designed to make Netflix toxic, the defense didn't matter. The narrative was already set before anyone found the tampons.

Where This Lands

The tampon story is too perfect to be the real reason and too real to be irrelevant. But somewhere between "Netflix got outbid" and "Netflix got woked out of the deal" is the real answer: In 2026, a company's bathroom policy can become a national news story, a Senate hearing can double as a campaign rally, and a $110 billion deal can hinge on who has the president's phone number.

Sources