By the standards of 2026, March is a long ways away, particularly with respect to this story. For starters, there is that ticking fee, a penalty which Paramount agreed to pay for every day after the end of September that the deal doesn't go through.
One interesting aspect of that fee which probably hasn't gotten the attention it deserves is that Paramount/the Ellisons only have to pay it if the deal goes through, which adds yet another moving part to what is already a very complicated piece of financial machinery.
If the deal does not go through, Paramount will have to pay $7 billion, certainly not a trivial amount even for rich people, but if the deal does go through, Larry Ellison personally is going to have to cough up somewhere between $40 and $50 billion. That is by any standard a hell of a lot of money to pay so that your nepo baby son can have his own media empire, but when you take into account that about a year ago, Larry Ellison was worth around $400 billion, it possibly didn't seem all that insane.
Since then, his net worth has dropped by more than half. More significantly, his ability to raise cash has taken even more of a hit. Both Ellison and Oracle are heavily in debt and have genuinely ugly credit ratings. What's worse, the current state of the company is widely considered precarious, especially if OpenAI is not able to turn things around.
Like I said, March is a long ways away.
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