Netflix‘s ambitious bid to acquire the studio and streaming assets of Warner Bros. Discovery — the deal that would have reshaped Hollywood — officially died on Thursday, when the WBD board declared Paramount Skydance’s sweetened $111 billion bid “superior” and Netflix walked away rather than match it. The streamer called the deal “no longer financially attractive” and turned its attention back to organic growth.
But the collapse of a deal Netflix had been pursuing for months came just days after the company — and its board — ignited a firestorm that was entirely self-inflicted. The accelerant was Susan Rice (pictured above in the White House with then-President Obama).
The Netflix board member and former Obama administration national security advisor appeared on the February 19 episode of the “Stay Tuned with Preet Bharara” podcast and delivered what can only be described as a political hand grenade rolled under Netflix’s own negotiating table. In the interview, Rice warned that corporations, law firms, universities, and media organizations that “take a knee to Trump” would face dire consequences when Democrats return to power, promising what she called an “accountability agenda” that sounded less like a policy framework and more like a threat of organized political retaliation.
“They are going to be caught with more than their pants down,” Rice said on the podcast, adding that companies should “already be starting to hear they better preserve their documents. They better be ready for subpoenas.”
This was not a subtle comment. This was a sitting director of a company that required a favorable Department of Justice antitrust determination — currently under a Trump-appointed attorney general — to consummate an $82.7 billion acquisition, using her platform to threaten the business community for cooperating with the very administration overseeing that approval.
Barack Obama with Susan Rice (leaning on desk)/PHOTO: White House (CC)
President Trump responded with characteristic bluntness on Truth Social, demanding Netflix fire “racist, Trump Deranged Susan Rice, IMMEDIATELY, or pay the consequences.” Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos publicly brushed off the demand, telling the BBC that the Warner Bros. deal was “a business deal,” not “a political deal.”
But as NLPC noted, Sarandos was being disingenuous: there is no plausible business rationale for Rice — whose entire career has been in government and politics — to sit on Netflix’s board at all. Her appointment was a DEI-era political gesture that has now become a corporate liability.
Corporate governance experts who spoke with Business Insider in the aftermath were pointedly critical of Rice’s behavior. Charles Elson, the founding director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware, was direct: “It’s poor judgment. And you’re elected as a director for your judgment.” He added the obvious question Rice should have asked herself: “Am I a public figure or am I a corporate director?” Elson noted that he personally avoids staking out public political positions as a director, saying “I just don’t think it’s in my lane.”
Bradley Akubuiro, a partner at leadership advisory firm Bully Pulpit International, turned it into a case study: “Every company in America that has a pending regulatory approval should be watching the case. The lesson is: Understand when your company is at peak vulnerability and govern that accordingly. Time really does matter.” Jennifer Schielke, CEO of Summit Group Solutions, put it plainly: “The boardroom should be designed for robust dissent that is productive and private.”
As NLPC has documented at length, Rice has a long history of treating truth and institutional process as tools in service of partisan ends — from the Benghazi Sunday show deceptions to the controversial unmasking of General Michael Flynn. Her podcast appearance was simply the latest entry in that record, this time with the added dimension of placing Netflix’s major deal at risk precisely when the company could least afford the distraction.
Whether Rice’s inflammatory remarks became the proverbial straw that broke the deal’s back by hardening the White House’s posture toward Netflix — at the very moment Paramount’s CEO David Ellison was cultivating a close personal relationship with President Trump — is a fair question that Netflix shareholders ought to be asking.
The incident is also a window into a much broader imbalance that has gone largely unremarked: the strikingly one-sided concentration of politically partisan activist directors on the boards of America’s largest companies.
A survey of Fortune 100 boardrooms reveals multiple examples of outspoken left-wing partisan figures serving as directors — and virtually no equivalent counterparts from the right. Rice herself is the most prominent, but she is far from alone. Microsoft’s board includes Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder who infamously wished Donald Trump had been made an “actual martyr” — a comment NLPC has covered extensively and demanded accountability for. Hoffman has been among the largest Democratic donors in Silicon Valley, financing a sprawling network of progressive causes and operations. Obama’s longest-serving senior advisor, Valerie Jarrett, serves on the board of Walgreens Boots Alliance, where she applies her “passion and advocacy for workplace equality, diversity and inclusion.” When she joined the board, Jarrett was explicit that her governing philosophy derived entirely from her government service and progressive political commitments, not from any conventional business expertise.
Fortune 100 CEO political giving data underscores the asymmetry. According to research published by Harvard’s corporate governance blog, roughly 85% of disclosed political donations from Fortune 100 CEOs during the 2020 and 2022 cycles went to Republican-affiliated candidates and committees — suggesting that as a group, these CEOs personally lean conservative. Yet a separate and striking pattern emerges at the director level: the political activists who have found their way onto major corporate boards in recent years have come almost exclusively from the left. Dana White, the UFC chief and Trump ally, was added to Meta’s board in early 2025 — a notable exception that proves the rule. But White is not a political operative who campaigns publicly for the Republican Party and threatens business leaders who don’t share his views. Rice and Hoffman are.
The explanation is the era of DEI board appointments that swept Corporate America over the past decade, driven in large part by ESG pressure from institutional investors and proxy advisors. The demand for directors who could signal ideological commitment to progressive values — racial equity, climate, social justice — created a pipeline of Democratic Party operatives and Obama/Biden alumni who were placed on boards not for their business acumen but for their political and cultural symbolism.
The policy moment that made those appointments seem like a “safe” way to appease stakeholders has now ended abruptly. And as Netflix’s experience illustrates, the political operatives companies recruited to adorn their boards have discovered their political pulpit is still very much in working order — even if it now points directly at the companies paying them to sit quietly and govern.
Susan Rice’s usefulness to Netflix was always theoretical — a signal to a particular cultural moment that is now obsolete. Her ability to cause tangible damage to the company’s interests, on the other hand, has proven very real. The Warner Bros. Discovery deal is dead. Netflix’s stock tumbled in the days following her podcast appearance. And the question of whether she contributed to both outcomes deserves a direct answer from Netflix’s leadership to its shareholders.
