Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison has personally guaranteed $40.4 billion to shore up Paramount's bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, trying to ease financing doubts as Warner Bros weighs a rival offer from Netflix. Reuters reports: Paramount said the amended terms do not change the $30-per-share all-cash offer even as the fight for Hollywood's sought-after assets heats up, with control of Warner Bros' vast library offering a decisive edge in the streaming wars. "I doubt many Warner Bros shareholders that are on the fence or planning to vote no "were holding out due to issues the "revised bid addresses such as a guarantee from Larry Ellison on the funding front," said Seth Shafer, principal analyst at S&P Global. As part of the revised terms, Ellison also agreed not to revoke the family trust or transfer its assets during the pendency of the transaction, the filing showed. Paramount said it has raised its regulatory reverse termination fee to $5.8 billion from $5 billion to match the competing transaction and extended the expiration date of its tender offer to January 21, 2026. The "bid follows Warner Bros asking its shareholders to reject the $108.4 billion offer from Paramount for the whole company, including cable TV assets, on doubts over its financing and the lack of a full guarantee from the Ellison family. But Warner Bros investors, including the fifth largest shareholder Harris Associates, have said they would be open to revised offers from Paramount if it presents a superior bid and addresses issues with deal terms. Under the Netflix agreement, Warner Bros would owe Netflix $2.8 billion as breakup fee if it walks away from that deal.

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Vince Zampella, the co-creator of Call of Duty and co-founder of Infinity Ward and Respawn Entertainment, died at 55 in a single-car accident in Los Angeles. According to NBC Los Angeles, "The single-car crash was reported at about 12:45 p.m. on the scenic road north of Los Angeles in the San Gabriel Mountains. The southbound car veered off the road, hit a concrete barrier and a passenger was ejected, the California Highway Patrol said. The driver was trapped in the ensuing car fire, the CHP said. The driver died at the scene and the passenger died at a hospital, authorities told NBC4 Investigates." IGN reports: Zampella was an incredibly talented game developer who changed the industry with Call of Duty, a franchise he co-created with Jason West in 2003 at Infinity Ward, the studio he co-founded with West, after previously serving as the lead designer for EA's Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. Zampella was at the center of a high-profile lawsuit against Activision that alleged that the publisher owed Zampella and the Infinity Ward team millions of dollars in unpaid Call of Duty royalties. The bitter professional divorce led to Zampella and West taking a substantial number of the Infinity Ward team with them to EA, where they co-founded Respawn Entertainment, a studio that has produced nothing but critically acclaimed hits: Titanfall, Titanfall 2, Apex Legends, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. Respawn's success under Zampella led to him getting promoted twice, eventually overseeing the Battlefield franchise within his role as Group General Manager at EA.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, the US Department of the Interior announced that it was pausing the leases on all five offshore wind sites currently under construction in the US. The move comes despite the fact that these projects already have installed significant hardware in the water and on land; one of them is nearly complete. In what appears to be an attempt to avoid legal scrutiny, the Interior is blaming the decisions on a classified report from the Department of Defense. The second Trump administration announced its animosity toward offshore wind power literally on day one, issuing an executive order on inauguration day that called for a temporary halt to issuing permits for new projects pending a re-evaluation. Earlier this month, however, a judge vacated that executive order, noting that the government has shown no indication that it was even attempting to start the re-evaluation it said was needed. But a number of projects have gone through the entire permitting process, and construction has started. Before today, the administration had attempted to stop these in an erratic, halting manner. Empire Wind, an 800 MW farm being built off New York, was stopped by the Department of the Interior, which alleged that it had been rushed through permitting. That hold was lifted following lobbying and negotiations by New York and the project developer Orsted, and the Department of the Interior never revealed why it changed its mind. When the Interior Department blocked a second Orsted project, Revolution Wind offshore of southern New England, the company took the government to court and won a ruling that let it continue construction. Today's announcement targets those and three other projects. Interior says it is pausing the permits for all five, which are the only projects currently under construction. It claims that offshore wind creates "national security risks" that were revealed in a recent analysis performed by the Department of Defense, which apparently neglected to identify these issues during the evaluations it did while the projects were first permitted. What are these risks? The Interior Department is being extremely coy. It notes that offshore wind turbines can interfere with radar sensing, but that's been known for a while. In announcing the decision, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum also noted "the rapid evolution of the relevant adversary technologies." But the announcement says that the Defense Department analysis is classified, meaning nobody is likely to know what the actual reason is -- presuming one exists. The classification will also make it far more challenging to contest this decision in court.

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