Acquisition of 21st Century Fox by Disney
2019 business transaction involving Twenty-First Century Fox, Inc. and The Walt Disney Company
The Walt Disney Company announced its acquisition of 21st Century Fox (21CF) on December 14, 2017. As part of their definitive agreement, Disney was to acquire Fox for $52.4 billion in stock (or 0.2745 Disney shares per 21CF share) and assume 21CF's debt obligations for $23.5 billion, totaling the transaction to approximately $66.1 billion. Due to Federal Communications Commission rules prohibiting a merger of two of the Big Four television networks, 21CF would spin-off certain assets, including the Fox Broadcasting Company, Fox Television Stations, Fox News, Fox Business, and Fox Sports, into a separate publicly-traded company immediately prior to the acquisition.
Disney's CEO Bob Iger came up with the idea of the acquisition after Disney acquired a majority control of BAMTech in 2015 as part of efforts to launch their own streaming service (ultimately named Disney+). Development of the acquisition began as early as November 2017, when Disney met with 21CF's CEO Rupert Murdoch to acquire 21CF's entertainment assets, including the film studio 20th Century Fox. Disney formally announced its acquisition of 21CF's entertainment assets the following month. Upon the initial announcement, concerns were raised about the acquisition's potential impact on the entertainment industry, as well as competition with other media companies.
In June 2018, following AT&T's acquisition of Time Warner (subsequently renamed WarnerMedia), Comcast initiated a rival all-cash bid of $65 billion for the targeted assets that Disney intended to purchase. In response, Disney increased its bid to $71.3 billion in cash and stock. After Fox agreed to Disney's amended offer, Comcast withdrew from the deal the following month to focus on its acquisition of Sky Group.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Acquisition of 21st Century Fox by Disney” is 2019 business transaction involving Twenty-First Century Fox, Inc. and The Walt Disney Company. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Acquisition, 21st and Century, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Acquisition of 21st Century Fox by Disney” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.