Jennifer Saba

Apropos of the company he runs, Bob Iger knows how to tell a tale of adventure. Walt Disney boldly laid out a three-year forecast that details everything from broad earnings growth to profitability projections for its streaming TV services. Although the outlook helped add as much as 10% to its market value, there are some gaping holes in the story.

DirecTV said on Nov. 12 it would terminate its merger with rival satellite pay-TV provider EchoStar's Dish by a Nov. 22 deadline.

A satellite deal is now lost in space. DirecTV ended plans to buy its pay-TV rival after controlling shareholder Charlie Ergen refused to haggle with bondholders. He’ll be stuck with an unwanted pile of debt, creditors are left on shaky ground and sizeable synergies are set to vanish.

Threats of tariffs or banning telecommunications equipment were the easy part. TikTok illustrates what happens when the trade war gets difficult. A U.S. federal court has unambiguously supported the government's assertion that the short-form video app's relationship with Chinese parent ByteDance raises national security concerns. European allies are on guard, too. A looming January deadline is a decisive test.

The advertising industry’s newest target: itself. Omnicom has agreed to buy rival Interpublic for $13 billion in an all-stock deal that would create the world’s largest collection of agencies by revenue. Promised cost savings make the idea stack up financially, but there’s no way to spin the rationale as anything but defensive.

David Zaslav may rejoin the media M&A fray. The Warner Bros Discovery boss is reorganizing his assets into two key divisions, further isolating the media company’s dying TV networks. It comes after rival Comcast announced a full split. Something bigger may be in the offing.

Walt Disney is changing some channels, but shareholders are watching the same show. The entertainment conglomerate unveiled plans to inject its struggling Hulu Live TV bundle into the $2 billion owner of rival streaming service FuboTV . Although the transaction helps clear the way for a separate sports-package joint venture, the fast-fading broadcast television problem lingers.

It’s only fitting that TikTok’s fate turn into a wild dance. As the U.S. Supreme Court weighs up the constitutionality of a proposed ban on the popular video app, Beijing has pirouetted into the possibility of letting ByteDance sell it to Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla and owner of social media site X. With so many stakeholders, however, it will take more than just two to tango.

Trade warriors are scrambling to avoid the consequences of their actions. The top U.S. court upheld a bipartisan law to ban TikTok in just two days’ time. Yet neither outgoing President Joe Biden nor incoming President-elect Donald Trump want the social media app to go dark on their watch. It’s familiar behavior from Uncle Sam: catching threats too late and creating a mess trying to clean them up.

The wide world of sports betting is narrowing. DraftKings and FanDuel have about 80% of the U.S. market, which could reach $39 billion in size by 2030, the latter company’s owner Flutter Entertainment reckons. High entry costs and slick products stack the house in the duopoly’s favor. Absent a regulatory crackdown, it looks like years of red ink will finally pay off.