The company’s co-CEOs, Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, said the deal, which values Warner Brothers Discovery at $83 billion, will accelerate its own core streaming business while helping it expand into TV and the theatrical film business. 

“This is an exciting time in the business. Lots of innovation, lots of competition,” Sarandos enthused on Tuesday’s earnings conference call. Netflix has a history of successful transformation and of pivoting opportunistically, he reminded the audience: Once upon a time, its main business entailed mailing DVDs in red envelopes to customers’ homes. 

Despite Sarandos’ confident delivery, however, the pitch didn’t land with investors. The company’s stock, which was already down 15% since Netflix announced the deal in early December, sank another 4.9% in after-hours trading on Tuesday. 

Netflix’s financial results for the final quarter of 2025 were fine. The company beat EPS expectations by a penny, and said it now has 325 million paid subscribers and a worldwide total audience nearing 1 billion. Its 2026 revenue outlook, of between $50.7 billion and $51.7 billion, was right on target.  

Still, investors are worried that the Warner Bros. deal will force Netflix to compete outside its lane, causing management to lose focus. The fact that Netflix will temporarily halt its share buybacks in order to accumulate cash to help finance the deal, as it disclosed towards the bottom of Tuesday’s shareholder letter, probably didn’t help matters. 

And given that there’s a rival offer for Warner Bros from Paramount Skydance, it’s not unreasonable for investors to worry that Netflix may be forced into an expensive bidding war. (Even though Warner Brothers Discovery has accepted the Netflix offer over Paramount’s, no one believes the story is over—not even Netflix, which updated its $27.75 per share offer to all-cash, instead of stock and cash, hours earlier on Tuesday in order to provide WBD shareholders with “greater value certainty.”) 

Investors are wary; will regulators balk?

Warner Brothers investors are not the only audience that Netflix needs to win over. The deal must be blessed by antitrust regulators—a prospect whose outcome is harder to predict than ever in the Trump administration.

Sarandos and Peters laid out the case Tuesday for why they believe the deal will get through the regulatory process, framing the deal as a boon for American jobs.

“This is going to allow us to significantly expand our production capacity in the U.S. and to keep investing in original content in the long term, which means more opportunities for creative talent and more jobs,” Sarandos said.

Referring to Warner Brothers’ television and film businesses, he added that “these folks have extensive experience and expertise. We want them to stay on and run those businesses. We’re expanding content creation not collapsing it.”

It’s a compelling story. But the co-CEOs may have neglected to study the most important script of all when it comes to getting government approval in the current administration; they forgot to recite the Trump lines. 

The example has been set over the past 12 months by peers such as Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. The latter, with his company facing various federal regulatory threats, began publicly praising the Trump administration on an earnings call last January. 

And Nvidia’s Huang has already seen real dividends from a similar strategy. The chip company CEO has praised Trump repeatedly on earnings calls, in media interviews, and in conference keynote speeches, calling him “America’s unique advantage” in AI. Since then, the U.S. ban on selling Nvidia’s H200 AI chips to China has been rescinded. The praise may have been coincidental to the outcome, but it certainly didn’t hurt.

In contrast, the president went unmentioned on Tuesday’s call. How significant Netflix’s omission of a Trump call-out turns out to be remains to be seen; maybe it won’t matter at all. But it’s worth noting that its competitor for Warner Bros., Paramount Skydance, is helmed by David Ellison, an outspoken Trump supporter. 

It’s a storyline that Netflix should have seen coming, and itmay still send the company back to rewrite.

Americans are paying 96% of the costs of tariffs as prices for goods rise, according to research published Monday by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German think tank. 

In April 2025 when President Donald Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs, he claimed: “For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped, and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike.” But the report suggests tariffs have actually cost Americans more money.

Trump has long used tariffs as leverage in non-trade political disputes. Over the weekend, Trump renewed his trade war in Europe after Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland sent troops for training exercises in Greenland. The countries will be hit with a 10% tariff starting on Feb. 1 that is set to rise to 25% on June 1, if a deal for the U.S. to buy Greenland is not reached. 

On Monday, Trump threatened a 200% tariff on French wine, after French President Emmanuel Macron refused to join Trump’s “Board of Peace” for Gaza, which has a $1 billion buy-in for permanent membership. 

“The claim that foreign countries pay these tariffs is a myth,” wrote Julian Hinz, research director at the Kiel Institute and an author of the study. “The data show the opposite: Americans are footing the bill.” 

The research shows export prices stayed the same, but the volume has collapsed. After imposing a 50% tariff on India in August, exports to the U.S. dropped 18% to 24%, compared to the European Union, Canada, and Australia. Exporters are redirecting sales to other markets, so they don’t need to cut sales or prices, according to the study.

“There is no such thing as foreigners transferring wealth to the U.S. in the form of tariffs,” Hinz told The Wall Street Journal. 

For the study, Hinz and his team analyzed more than 25 million shipment records between January 2024 through November 2025 that were worth nearly $4 trillion.They found exporters absorbed just 4% of the tariff burden and American importers are largely passing on the costs to consumers. 

Tariffs have increased customs revenue by $200 billion, but nearly all of that comes from American consumers. The study’s authors likened this to a consumption tax as wealth transfers from consumers and businesses to the U.S. Treasury.   

Trump has also repeatedly claimed tariffs would boost American manufacturing, butthe economy has shown declines in manufacturing jobs every month since April 2025, losing 60,000 manufacturing jobs between Liberation Day and November. 

The Supreme Court was expected to rule as soon as today on whether Trump’s use of emergency powers to levy tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act was legal. The court initially announced they planned to rule last week and gave no explanation for the delay. 

Although justices appeared skeptical of the administration’s authority during oral arguments in November, economists predict the Trump administration will find alternative ways to keep the tariffs.

The acceleration in borrowing, with the national debt standing at $38.4 trillion and growing as of January 9, is sharpening warnings from budget watchdogs and Wall Street alike that the country’s fiscal path is becoming a growing vulnerability for the economy.​ The total national debt has grown by $71,884.09 per second for the past year, according to Congressman David Schweikert’s Daily Debt Monitor.

Over the 12 months from the close of trading on Jan. 17, 2025, to the end of day Jan. 15, 2026, the federal government added approximately $2.25 trillion to the national debt, according to calculations shared exclusively with Fortune by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. That period roughly captures President Donald Trump’s first year back in office, as it is the last business day before last year’s Inauguration Day and the most recent day for which data are available. The jump from $37 trillion to $38 trillion in just two months between August and October was particularly notable, with the Peterson Foundation calculating at the time that it was the fastest rate of growth outside the pandemic. Michael A. Peterson, CEO of the nonpartisan watchdog dedicated to fiscal sustainability, told Fortune at the time that “if it seems like we are adding debt faster than ever, that’s because we are.”

As for how these figures compare to recent presidencies, the Peterson Foundation provided calculations (below) for each calendar year over the last quarter-century, revealing that President Joe Biden owns the highest year of national debt growth outside the pandemic, with almost $2.6 trillion in 2023. President Trump far and away holds the record, with nearly $4.6 trillion of national-debt growth occurring during the pandemic year of 2020, when massive federal spending occurred in the form of economic relief measures.

Trump and Biden together own the top five highest-debt-incurring years, two for Trump and three for Biden, across five of the last six years. While the figures are not adjusted for inflation, by and large, Trump and Biden have roughly doubled the rate of debt accumulation under President Barack Obama and tripled, even quadrupled the rate of growth under President George W. Bush, depending on which term you’re looking at. To be sure, both Bush and Obama presided over the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008, with experts still debating whether their fiscal responses were large enough.

Interest costs explode

The surge in debt is landing just as interest costs on that debt become one of Washington’s fastest‑growing expenses. The specific line item for net interest in the federal budget totaled $970 billion for fiscal year 2025, but the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) calculated that, including spending for net interest payments on the public debt, this broke the $1 trillion barrier for the first time. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, another nonpartisan watchdog, projects $1 trillion per year in interest payments from here on out.

Trump has repeatedly argued that his ambitious tariff program will be enough to tame the debt burden, casting duties on imports as a kind of magic revenue source for Washington. Treasury data show tariffs are bringing in significantly more money than before—likely in the $300 billion to $400 billion‑a‑year range—but even optimistic projections suggest those sums only cover a fraction of annual interest costs and an even smaller slice of total federal spending.​ As Trump retreated from many of his tariff threats—before the January 2026 spike that he threatened in relation to his desire for U.S. possession of Greenland—the CBO calculated that $800 billion of projected deficit reduction had also vanished.

At the same time, the administration has promised to share some of that tariff revenue directly with households through a proposed $2,000 “dividend” for every American, a pledge that independent analysts estimate could cost around $600 billion per year and further widen the deficit unless offset elsewhere. Economists say that the combination—more borrowing, high interest rates, and new permanent commitments—risks locking in structural deficits that keep the debt rising faster than the overall economy.​

Markets and America’s ‘Achilles’ heel’

Financial markets are taking notice. As Washington auctions hundreds of billions of dollars in new Treasury securities each week, yields on longer‑term notes and bonds have moved higher, reflecting both tighter monetary conditions and investor unease about the sheer volume of U.S. borrowing. Recent analysis from Deutsche Bank and others has described America’s mounting debt load as an “Achilles heel” that could leave the dollar and broader economy more vulnerable to shocks, particularly as geopolitical tensions and tariff fights escalate.​

Those worries are amplified by the prospect of future recessions or emergencies that could force the government to borrow even more heavily on top of today’s already‑elevated baseline. Rating agencies and international lenders have not sounded any immediate alarm about U.S. solvency, but they have increasingly highlighted fiscal risks in their outlooks, pointing to widening deficits and a political system that has struggled to impose discipline.​

Voters are paying attention

If there is one thing Americans still broadly agree on, it is that the debt problem matters. Recent polling sponsored by the Peterson Foundation found that roughly 82% of voters say the national debt is an important issue for the country, even as they remain divided over which programs to cut or taxes to raise.​

Trump first won office vowing to erase the national debt over time; a decade later, after his return to power, that figure has instead climbed to record highs. As the administration prepares for another year of governing—and another season of fiscal showdowns on Capitol Hill—the question is shifting from whether the debt is growing too fast to how long the world’s largest economy can keep outrunning its own balance sheet.

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.