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The Netflix Effect

How much could Netflix charge if a subscription included HBO Max?

Here’s what streaming companies, many of which offer streaming bundles, charge now.

12/5/25 9:52AM

Netflix has agreed to buy Warner Bros. Discovery’s studio and streaming businesses in one of the biggest acquisitions of the year — one that could shake up the entertainment industry and also greatly affect regular customers. Pending regulatory hurdles, Netflix says it plans to combine Warner Bros.’ vast content library — including HBO programming and the 100-year-plus portfolio of Warner Bros. films — into its own dominant streaming platform rather than operate the services separately.

“This acquisition will improve our offering and accelerate our business for decades to come,” co-CEO Greg Peters said in a press release.

For customers, who are surely happy to get titles like “Citizen Kane” and “Harry Potter,” the key question is: How much will this cost?

Streaming services have been steadily ratcheting up prices in recent years. They’ve also increasingly turned to bundles — pairing services like Paramount+ and Apple TV+ or Disney, Hulu, and HBO Max at a discount — as a way to compete.

Netflix, however, has been notably resistant to first-party bundles, and this deal doesn’t suggest a change in strategy. Instead of offering HBO Max as a separate subscription, Netflix appears poised to integrate the content directly into its core service. And because HBO Max’s audience significantly overlaps with Netflix’s, the acquisition won’t meaningfully expand Netflix’s reach. The likeliest lever left for the company is pricing — though how high it might go remains unclear.

As Disney CEO Bob Iger said on a recent earnings call announcing the coming merger of Disney+ and Hulu into a single app: “I imagine down the road, it may give us some price elasticity as well that we haven’t had before.”

Here’s where the prices of existing streaming services stand:

Jon Keegan12h

FT: Meta considering “tens of billions” in new capital to fund AI

Just days after Google announced a monster $85 billion upsized equity raise, the extremely profitable Meta is seeking to sell “tens of billions of dollars” in stock, according to a new report from the Financial Times.

Meta is planning on spending between $125 billion and $145 billion on AI capital expenditure this year alone.

Shares dropped more than 5% on the news.

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Meta is supercharging its subscription businesses

The free-app giant never really cared about recurring revenue. Now, it’s launching paid plans for all sorts of stuff.

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FT: Anthropic staff helping the NSA use Mythos for offensive cyberattacks

Anthropic’s Mythos AI model was deemed too dangerous to release to the public, with the company citing its ability to orchestrate novel cyberattacks.

And that’s just what the National Security Agency is doing, with the help of Anthropic staff embedded at the agency, according to a report from the Financial Times.

Only a small number of companies and US allies have been given access to the advanced model, which means America’s adversaries have not had the chance to shore up their defenses against the AI model’s new offensive capabilities.

The arrangement is especially unusual as the Pentagon has deemed Anthropic’s AI a national security supply chain risk — effectively blacklisting it for defense work — in response to the company’s refusal to allow its technology to be used for any legal application, which could include autonomous killing or mass surveillance. Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the determination.

US National Security Agency using Anthropic’s Mythos for cyber attacks

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Longtime Tesla bear JPMorgan upgraded Tesla and raised its price target to $475 from $145

For more than a decade, JPMorgan was Wall Street’s most stubborn Tesla skeptic, anchored by auto analyst Ryan Brinkman’s strict focus on traditional car fundamentals and near-term delivery numbers.

But JPM recently handed coverage of the stock to a new analyst, Rajat Gupta, who is throwing that playbook out the window. In a note Friday, the firm upgraded Tesla to “neutral” from “underweight” and raised its price target 228% to $475 from $145. (The analyst consensus on FactSet is $403.) Instead of focusing on the company’s struggling vehicle business, the new analyst is orienting himself more toward Tesla’s idea of the future, now modeling Tesla’s physical AI and robotaxi fleets all the way out to the year 2040.

Here are the main reasons for the capitulation:

Looking past the car lot: Gupta argues that Tesla “is at the forefront of physical AI, entering uncharted TAMs” and therefore “deserves the benefit of the doubt to be valued on LT earnings potential” rather than near-term speed bumps.
Unmatched vertical integration: Tesla’s control over everything from battery cells to custom silicon gives it a massive moat. JPM notes this starting point advantage is “unmatched at an industrial level scale” and “still somewhat under-appreciated and misunderstood.”
The AWS flywheel effect: Deploying Optimus robots inside its own factories “should not only lower COGS for the base automotive business, but more importantly, help validate the product at an industrial scale.” Gupta called it “a classic flywheel effect, somewhat analogous to AWS and Kiva at AMZN.”

For Tesla bulls who have argued for years that this is an AI company and not a carmaker, JPM’s sudden $3.9 trillion valuation model is the ultimate validation.

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