The European Commission cleared Paramount Skydance's acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery under the Foreign Subsidies Regulation (FSR) on Tuesday 14 July.1 The FSR, in force since 2023, lets Brussels examine whether state money from outside the EU distorts a takeover; here it scrutinised roughly $24bn of equity from the Saudi, Qatari and Abu Dhabi sovereign-wealth funds backing the Ellison-controlled bid.
Brussels ran this as one of the 'two clocks' flagged when the merger stalled on 1 July. The subsidies question and the competition question are separate reviews on separate legal tracks, and clearing the first says nothing about the second. The film-distribution remedy is still under assessment for the 22 July competition ruling.
For Gulf state investors, the clearance matters beyond this one deal. The FSR is the instrument European regulators reach for when sovereign-fund money enters a strategic sector, and a clean pass on a headline media takeover signals how much room that capital has to buy into European-facing assets. A blocked or conditioned FSR review would have forced the Ellisons to restructure the financing itself, not merely divest an asset.
Clearance under the FSR does not settle the deal. It closes one of the specific objections a regulator could still raise, and hands the remaining risk to the competition track and the twelve-state suit filed a day earlier in San Francisco.
