The head of Netflix has responded publicly for the first time to President Donald Trump’s calls for it to remove Susan Rice from its board.
“This is a business deal. It’s not a political deal,” Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO of Netflix, told the BBC’s Today program on Monday, referring to the company’s bid to buy Warner Bros. “This deal is run by the Department of Justice in the US, and regulators throughout Europe and around the world.”
In a Saturday Truth Social post, Trump called on Netflix to fire Rice, a former US ambassador and national security advisor in the Obama and Biden administrations, from its board of directors.
Trump was responding to comments Rice made in a podcast about corporations that “take a knee to Trump,” warning that they could face retribution from a future Democratic administration.
When asked by the BBC how big a deal it was for the president to weigh in on Rice, Sarandos said: “He likes to do a lot of things on social media.”
It comes at a delicate time for Netflix, which is battling Paramount to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. A deal would require approval from the Department of Justice’s antitrust division.
Earlier this month, Trump had said he “shouldn’t be involved” in the deal. But that changed over the weekend, with the president writing that Netflix should remove Rice from its board “or pay the consequences.”
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Business Insider’s Peter Kafka called Trump’s demands an “extraordinary use of power” and said it’s a reminder that the White House would be involved in the future of Warner Bros., regardless of what Trump is saying at any given moment.
Speaking to the BBC, Sarandos said his pitch to Trump for Netflix’s Warner Bros. bid is “growth in the economy.”
He said that Netflix’s deal is a “vertical merger” in which the company is buying assets it doesn’t already have, and so it will be “adding to the market.”
While Netflix is seeking to buy Warner Bros. streaming and studio assets, Paramount is looking to buy all of the company.
The board of Warner Bros. Discovery earlier gave Paramount a seven-day window to submit a new offer, which expires at the end of Monday.
On February 17, WBD told shareholders that “a senior representative” from Paramount said the company would pay at least $31 per share for WBD, and that the bid wasn’t the company’s “best and final” proposal. The company’s previous bid in December was for $30 per share.
Disclosure: Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Business Insider’s parent company, is a Netflix board member.
