Podbit · Up First from NPR
Trump has openly said he wanted CNN in the Ellisons' hands. The Ellisons took over CBS, installed a right-leaning editor, and Trump liked what he saw. When the regulator is the regulated's biggest fan, don't expect an antitrust fight.
Where this was said
At 8:24 · chapter starts 6:32
David Folkenflik takes the anchor chair for the media story of the year: the DOJ's Antitrust Division has signed off on Paramount's $111 billion bid for the much larger Warner Bros. Discovery without imposing a single condition. [1] — David Folkenflik "The DOJ's Antitrust Division just waved through the biggest like-for-like merger in Hollywood history with zero conditions. Two of the last…" 06:31 The deal combines Paramount+ with HBO, CBS with CNN, and two of Hollywood's last remaining legacy studio empires — a combination Folkenflik describes as the biggest like-for-like merger in the industry's history. The DOJ's rationale was that in the streaming era, the relevant competitive market has exploded: Netflix, Apple, Amazon Prime Video, and others provide ample competition. That argument may be legally defensible, but the sheer scale of the consolidation — and the fact that zero divestitures were required — still struck observers as remarkable.
The DOJ approved Paramount's $111 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery with zero conditions attached — the biggest like-for-like merger in Hollywood history.
After an 8-month review, the DOJ's Antitrust Division found no threat to competition and imposed zero conditions on the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger.
The simplest customer acquisition funnel: write content every day, send that audience to a waitlist landing page, and collect emails. Those subscribers already trust you and know the pain they want solved — that's why they become your first 100 customers.
Content before code. A $42K/month founder lays out the full playbook: push content for 14 days, mine audience pain points, build a product for the biggest one, launch to that core group, then double down on what works. Audience validation is the unfair advantage most founders skip.
Most founders build first and market later. This founder flips it: 14 days of content to warm up the audience and surface the real pain points before a single line of code is written. The result is a ready-made group of users waiting on launch day.
The temptation is to build a feature-rich product. This founder's answer is the opposite: pick the single biggest pain point from your audience and build a product that solves only that. Focus is the feature.
There's no need to launch to the world on day one. The founder pushes the product directly to the core group that originally provided the pain-point validation — they already want the solution. That's how the first users become paying customers without a single cold acquisition.
After the initial launch, growth comes from a simple loop: find which content resonates, double down on it, and use it to attract more people just like your core audience. It's not complex — it's consistent.
Perfecting a product for months guarantees nothing. The Starter Story founder pressed publish on his meticulously crafted site and watched zero users arrive — the brutal lesson every founder needs to hear.
The world's best companies didn't buy their first customers — they went to where those customers already were and created content for them. Free channels like Reddit aren't a hack; they're the actual strategy.
A single link post on Reddit drove 100 visitors to Starter Story in minutes. Then the moderators deleted it. That deletion became the catalyst for a far smarter strategy.
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