Media M&A Plunges 40% in 2025 as Trump Chaos Chills Dealmakers

The re-election of Donald Trump with his regulatory-light approach to deal reviews left many in the media and entertainment industries hopeful for new opportunities for more mergers and acquisitions. But that Trump Bump in 2025 has remained elusive for those wishing for a wave of consolidation.

So far, M&A deals valued at $68.3 billion in technology, media and telecom have been announced in the U.S this year, according to data from Dealogic, a financial markets platform. That represents a 40% drop from the same time period last year, from the start of January to March 10, when more than $114 billion worth of deals took place. Overall, the total M&A market is down 20% from the start of last year, with $293 billion in deals across all sectors by March 10.

The number of media, tech and telecom agreements has also declined in 2025, with 500 deals made so far this year — 105 less than at the same point last year, according to Dealogic.

This was not expected. But the volatility that President Trump generates each day is hardly an ideal environment for companies to commit to a merger. Just Monday, worries of the impact of his tariff proposals and a possible recession sent stocks lower by their largest margin so far this year, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq seeing its biggest decline since 2022. The S&P 500 is down 4.3% on the year with Nasdaq taking an even bigger punch to the gut, dropping more than 9% since the start of the year. The president’s tariff plans, coupled with an underwhelming jobs report last Friday, have exacerbated the market’s unease.

The belief from many in Hollywood and on Wall Street had been that Trump 2.0 would spur a fresh wave of M&A activity, especially when it came to media companies.

At Allen & Co.’s Sun Valley media mogul retreat last summer, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav declined to endorse Joe Biden or Trump, but he did say it’s important that the next president be friendly to deals. “We just need an opportunity for deregulation, so companies can consolidate and do what we need to, to be even better,” he said the time. A WBD spokesman did not respond to a request Monday seeking comment on this latest M&A data.

Seemingly slam-dunk deals like Paramount’s $8 billion merger with Skydance now face questions, with Trump suing Paramount and CBS for $20 billion over how “60 Minutes” edited its interview with Kamala Harris last year. Comcast, which is looking to spin off its cable network portfolio, is facing an FCC investigation from new chairman Brendan Carr for its “promotion of DEI.”

Still, those in the dealmaking space remain optimistic that 2025 will turn out to be a big M&A year.

“Right now, the ice dam on the river is breaking,” Peter Horan, founder of Horan MediaTech Advisors, told TheWrap. “The on-the-ground evidence is the market is picking up.”

Horan, who has been a part of $2 billion worth of exits and $1 billion in acquisitions, pointed to a few key reasons he expects M&A activity to accelerate as the year unfolds. Those include:

1. Private Equity is ready to fund more deals:
The market the past few years has been “totally constipated,” Horan said, as private equity firms have had their funds tied up in bets made during 2021.

That year, $2.79 trillion worth of total M&A deals were made in the U.S.; since then, the annual M&A market has hovered between $1.47 trillion and $1.62 trillion, which is how much the American M&A market brought in last year, according to Dealogic.

Firms held onto their investments, hoping to cash in big bets, but that mood has shifted in early 2025, Horan said. Now, the thinking is “we need to return cash and do more investments and play.” In layman’s terms, firms are ready to place their bets again.

2. Interest rates:
Another reason the annual M&A market has been relatively tight the past few years is because interest rates have jumped dramatically since the pandemic. Deals that may look appealing at 3% have not looked as sexy at 10%, Horan explained. With interest rates expected to stay flat or decrease this year, dealmakers are warming up to making more pacts.

3. Trump regulation:
Setting aside the president’s personal beefs with certain companies, the FCC and FTC leadership now in place is still expected to be “more hands-off on business,” Horan said.

“The expectation is that anti-trust reviews will be easier to get by than it might have been in a Biden or Harris Administration,” he added.

Horan is not the only one that feels this way. McKinsey & Company made a similar argument in its annual M&A report published in February.

“Many of the dynamics that stymied dealmaking for the past three years, including some that limited 2024 global deal value and volume to roughly the average of the past 20 years, are receding,” McKinsey senior partners Jake Henry and Mieke Van Oostende wrote. “If this pattern continues, then M&A markets could shift dramatically in the next six to 12 months, especially as the year progresses.”

Henry and Van Oostende said they expect the tech sector to benefit in particular, “fueled by ample dry powder and a more favorable interest rate environment.”

With that in mind, it is worth keeping an eye on TikTok in the month ahead. The 75-day extension President Trump gave ByteDance, its parent company, to make a deal to sell its U.S. business now only has 25 days left. And this weekend, the president said “four different groups” were in talks on a potential deal with TikTok. Considering he has said he wants to “save” the app because it helped him win over Gen Z voters, the odds are strong an agreement will be reached soon.

Horan admitted that the recent market selloff, coupled with the Trump Administration making bold claims about buying Greenland and revamping the Gaza Strip, has dampened the dealmaking mood. “If we were having this conversation a month ago, the indicators were much more bullish,” he said.

But the macro factors that made investors so bullish on M&A activity remain unchanged. So it’s still possible that the total M&A market at the end of 2025 tops the $1.62 trillion in deals made in 2024, despite a rocky start.

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