Should we call him “Tampon Ted?”
According to a report this week by New York Post columnist Charles Gasparino, Netflix‘s months-long, $83 billion bid to acquire the studio and streaming assets of Warner Bros. Discovery collapsed in part because of what Republican lawmakers found in a men’s restroom during a visit to Netflix headquarters: a basket of tampons.
The so-called “Tampon Incident,” as it quickly became known on Capitol Hill, became a symbol of exactly the kind of ideological posturing that cost Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos (pictured above) crucial GOP goodwill as he tried to convince a skeptical Trump administration and Republican Congress that the company wasn’t a left-wing juggernaut seeking to gobble up the entertainment industry.
“This is 2026, not 2020,” one GOP staffer with first-hand knowledge of the matter told Gasparino. “What were they thinking?”
The short answer is that Netflix — or more specifically, its board of directors — was not thinking about anything beyond its own progressive commitments.
And the consequences were enormous. From its peak of around $134 per share in June 2025 following a ten-for-one stock split, Netflix shares plunged roughly 42 percent through mid-February 2026, hitting a 52-week low of $75.23 as regulatory uncertainty and the company’s staggering proposed debt load spooked investors. When Netflix finally bowed out of the bidding after Paramount Skydance raised its competing offer to $31 per share — roughly $111 billion for all of Warner Bros. Discovery — the stock bounced 14 percent in relief. Shareholders, it turned out, were not as enthusiastic about acquiring a media empire as management was.
The tampon was a symbol, but the rot ran deeper.
Before the men’s room incident could even make waves, Netflix board member Susan Rice had already torched the company’s credibility in Washington at the worst possible moment. As Gasparino reported last week (echoed by NLPC), just as Sarandos was in the midst of active antitrust discussions with Justice Department officials over the WBD deal, Rice — former Obama national security adviser, former Biden domestic policy chief, and a current Netflix board member — appeared on a podcast hosted by former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara to warn that companies which had “bent the knee” to the Trump administration would face an “accountability agenda” when Democrats regained power.
The reaction from the White House was immediate and predictable. President Trump took to Truth Social to demand that Netflix “fire racist, Trump Deranged Susan Rice, IMMEDIATELY, or pay the consequences.” One senior Trump regulatory official reportedly quipped that Sarandos should have “let Susan Rice tag along” to his DOJ meeting.
NLPC highlighted the obvious conflict her partisan identity created for a company seeking favors from a Republican administration — and we were among the first to ask directly whether Rice’s political tirade helped kill the Netflix-Warner Bros. deal altogether.
But Rice’s presence on the board was not an anomaly. It was a reflection of a board culture that has been marinated in Democratic Party politics for years. Reed Hastings, Netflix’s co-founder and chairman, and his wife have donated more than $20 million to the Democratic Party in recent years, including $1.5 million to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign and $7 million to a pro-Kamala Harris super PAC in 2024. Sarandos has made 18 political donations exclusively to Democrats, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. Board member Brad Smith, the former Microsoft president, has donated predominantly to Democrats, including $125,000 to the Nancy Pelosi Victory Fund and $150,000 to the Senate Majority PAC.
And those numbers only tell part of the story. When Sarandos appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee‘s antitrust subcommittee in February, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) asked him directly about employee donation patterns. According to the Washington Examiner‘s reporting from that hearing, Sarandos acknowledged the figure was “very high Democrat” — which tracked with OpenSecrets data showing that in the 2024 election cycle, Netflix employees directed approximately $4.4 million in donations with over 99 percent going to Democrats. That same near-unanimous pattern held in 2020, when Netflix was identified by CNBC as the most Democratic-leaning major tech company in the United States.
In the end, Netflix tried to have it both ways — presenting itself to the Trump administration as an ideologically neutral business concern while maintaining a board and workforce that is about as politically one-sided as any major corporation in America.
The tampon in the men’s room was, in a sense, the perfect metaphor for the whole misadventure: a company so committed to progressive signaling that it couldn’t suppress the impulse even when its most important deal in history was on the line. The $83 billion question is whether the Netflix board will learn anything from this debacle. Given its ideological composition, don’t count on it.
