The Moelis franchise had a busy year in 2025 across sports, media and entertainment: lead financial adviser on the hottest Hollywood auction while simultaneously setting valuation records across professional sports, talent representation, gaming and motorsport.
Moelis’ most notable mandate was the Netflix offer to acquire Warner Bros Discovery, Inc (WBD), announced in December 2025 at an enterprise value of $82.7 billion. Moelis was lead financial adviser to Netflix on what was set to be the largest media transaction since AT&T’s 2018 acquisition of Time Warner. Netflix eventually walked away from the deal in February 2026, following a hotly contested bidding war with Paramount Skydance – with a notable $2.8 billion break-up fee to terminate the earlier agreement.
Still, the advisory firm’s role spanned financial analysis and due diligence, bid structuring and financing strategy, and continuous board-level advisory support across a competitive, multi-party process that extended well beyond conventional M&A mechanics into regulatory strategy, antitrust positioning and public communications management – all under one roof.
“Every other counterparty had several advisers, but remember: there was one adviser to Netflix,” says Carlos Jimenez, managing director and global head of media, sports and entertainment at Moelis.
Under Netflix’s proposal, the deal was set to carve out the studio, HBO Max, and HBO, with Discovery Global to be separated into a new publicly traded entity. Disaggregating that estate across IP assets, content libraries, and intercompany arrangements spanning multiple jurisdictions required a fully integrated advisory approach.
The structural complexity reflected the nature of the asset and the bidding escalation that followed, with Paramount Skydance eventually winning the battle for WBD.
Sports firepower
The sports franchise generated comparable firepower across a broader set of sub-sectors. As exclusive advisor to the New York Giants’ ownership – in the franchise’s first formal competitive sale process in its century-long history – Moelis ran an auction that produced a 10% minority stake sale to Julia Koch and her family at a valuation exceeding $10 billion, the highest ever recorded for a professional sports team at the time of the announcement.
The firm also advised Sixth Street Partners on its minority investment in the New England Patriots and on its participation in the $6.1 billion acquisition of the Boston Celtics – the most expensive professional sports team acquisition on record at the time of the announcement and still the second largest deal ever in the category.
Every other counterparty had several advisers, but remember: there was one adviser to Netflix
Carlos Jimenez
In motorsport, Moelis acted as exclusive advisor to MSP Sports Capital and UBS O’Connor on the approximately $5 billion sale of their minority interests in McLaren Racing, again at a record valuation for a Formula One team.
The independence of the Moelis model is a structural feature that the firm’s clients in this sector specifically value. The firm holds no proprietary positions, takes no balance sheet risk, and carries no conflicting principal exposure. In a sector where several major banks have taken direct equity stakes in sports agencies, media companies and entertainment assets alongside their advisory businesses, the distinction is meaningful.
That clarity of mandate was equally visible in the firm’s work across sports adjacencies. Moelis advised Excel Sports Management on a strategic partnership with Goldman Sachs Alternatives that set a record transaction multiple for a talent representation agency. It also acted as exclusive advisor to PrizePicks on the majority (62.3%) stake sale to Allwyn International, at an upfront enterprise value of $2.5 billion rising to up to $4.15 billion if including a performance-based consideration – which could make it the largest daily fantasy sports transaction to date.
For AMC Entertainment, the team drew on capital markets and restructuring expertise alongside sector knowledge to structure a $2.9 billion exchange offer, consent solicitation and capital raise – the eighth Moelis mandate for the company since 2018.
The pattern across the full year’s deal flow reflects a deliberate sector thesis: that live sports, premium content IP and their commercial adjacencies are drawing institutional capital at scale precisely because they are structurally resilient to AI disruption and technology commoditisation. The volume of inbound demand the firm is seeing in that space – and the calibre of the mandates it is converting – suggests the franchise has established a durable position at the centre of where the most significant capital in global entertainment is moving.
