Anthropic vs. the Pentagon, the SaaSpocalypse, and why competitions is good, actually

Presented by dot tech domains, where tech founders find sharp, memorable names for their tech startups. Hello, and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. Today is Friday, March 6. I'm Kirsten Koroszek, transportation editor over at TechCrunch, and I'm joined, as always, by our weekend editor Anthony and senior reporter Sean O'Kane. I have an important question, which is what are we gonna call Paramount plus HBO Max Warner Brothers Discovery? Yeah. It's a it's a tough question. Luckily, it's it's not our problem. It's it's above our pay grade. But, yeah, I'm I mean, I'm definitely still just kind of processing this news even though it is, you know, more than a a week old at this point. But, you know, if you've been listening to Equity, you know, we were talking about Netflix acquiring Warner Brothers, and now Netflix has decided they're not they're taking themselves out of the race, and Paramount is acquiring Warner Brothers instead. Were you guys equally shocked? Yeah. Actually, kind of. I mean, there's so much consolidation. I guess I shouldn't be surprised by this. I feel like we were so focused on Netflix being part of the deal that I I guess I had decided that that was going to happen. So, I was a little bit surprised, but, really, if I I I shouldn't be I shouldn't be surprised at all. I was not surprised in the sense that buying WarnerMedia is, like, the sirens call of every media executive, apparently. They know it will lead them to shipwreck, and yet none of them can avoid it for whatever reason. So it was like it I feel like the Ellisons were always going to one up what Netflix had on the table, and they seemed pretty, confident that their connections to the administration were gonna help pave the way for that to happen. So that didn't surprise me. I will say to answer your question, we've got, like, Paramax. We've got HBO mount, maybe we could go with, or, you know, we could just call it, Ellison streaming. Like, let's just Yeah. That's the one. Yeah. Let's yeah. I do think they should be put front and center. I mean, Yeah. It's also funny because HBO Max itself and actually Paramount plus are also products of multiple rebrandings. I mean, most notoriously HBO Max, which was then Max for a while and is now HBO Max again. And then, you know, part of what that speaks to is this sense that HBO in particular is the thing that a lot of people know and like, but also doesn't necessarily have the mass you know, like, it it's also kind of slightly highbrow, and so they want something that has that, like, HBO fanciness, but also suggest that there's more to it than than HBO. And and I think maybe they felt like they'd solved it by going back to HBO Max, and now there's a …