Click here to read the full article.
Rob Bonta was less than a year into the job of California attorney general when he found himself at odds with one of the state’s most affluent communities. To get around a requirement to build more housing, Woodside
had declared that the entire town was a mountain lion habitat.
Bonta fired off a letter accusing the Silicon Valley enclave of breaking the law.
“Woodside was playing games, and we called those out and got them to stop immediately,” Bonta said. “We have no patience for it.”
That episode was emblematic of Bonta’s approach to the job — more confrontational than compromising, especially when he is challenging powerful interests. “The law isn’t a suggestion,” he wrote at the time. “From big corporations to small towns, it doesn’t matter who you are or what you do — the law needs to be followed.”
Bonta is now engaged in perhaps the biggest battle of his career, as he seeks to block Paramount Skydance from acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery. The son of two lefty activists from a Sacramento suburb, Bonta is facing off against Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, a billionaire’s son who grew up in Woodside.
Initially treated almost as an afterthought, Bonta’s antitrust lawsuit has become a major obstacle to Ellison’s ambitions and a source of neck-bulging outrage among Ellison’s supporters. Charles Gasparino, the conservative New York Post financial columnist, recently blasted Bonta as “a guy no one ever heard of.” He has also suggested that Bonta is motivated by animus toward President Trump, by the prospect of campaign donations from celebrities and from Paramount’s tech industry rivals, and by the need to “make a name for himself” in order to run for governor.
Bonta has also come under pressure from political allies to settle the case, including from his predecessor, Xavier Becerra, who is in line to become California’s governor in January. Bonta has defied that pressure, at least thus far. He canceled a settlement meeting with Paramount last week and accused the company of “playing games” by leaking details of the talks. (Paramount vehemently denied that it did so.)
“For him to come in as forcefully as he has — not just filing the lawsuit, but steadfastly in the face of political pressure, saying, ‘No, these guys are breaking the law and we need to stop it’ — that is remarkable,” said Alvaro Bedoya, a senior adviser at the American Economic Liberties Project who previously served on the Federal Trade Commission. “He is not a finger-in-the-wind attorney general who is just trying to score a few points.”
The pressure appears to have abated a little, though Paramount is still eager to make a deal. After Sept. 30, it will be on the hook to pay Warner Bros. shareholders $7 million a day — a figure that will grow to more than $1 billion by the time the antitrust trial begins next March. Though 11 other attorneys general are also involved, it will be largely up to Bonta to decide whether any settlement agreement is sufficient enough to allow the merger to go through.
If not well known on Wall Street, Bonta’s life story is familiar in California political circles. When he was a toddler, his family lived in a trailer at the United Farm Workers headquarters in the Tehachapi Mountains near Bakersfield. His parents, Cynthia and Warren Bonta, were missionaries and social justice activists who were drawn to the state’s signature civil rights struggle of that era.
“They were literally outside of supermarkets in the L.A. area, sleeves rolled up, clipboards in hand, signing up people for the lettuce boycott,” he said. “I do have some memories of that time. I don’t know if they were created by photos that I looked at later when I was older, or by images put in my head by conversations at the dinner table. But that time was formative in my family’s life and in my life.”
LISTEN to the full interview with Rob Bonta on Variety’s “Strictly Business” podcast
When he was still young, the family moved to Fair Oaks, a middle-class community outside Sacramento. His mother, a Filipina immigrant, remained a lifelong activist, protesting the Marcos regime in her homeland and trying to block the eviction of Filipino tenants in San Francisco. His father stayed true to his roots as well, working to establish community health clinics for the state Department of Health Services and serving on committees for diversity and racial equity.
From the age of seven, Rob Bonta was fanatical about soccer, becoming very competitive and very good. In a podcast interview with a former teammate, he described himself as a “blue collar” player whose job was to win back the ball and get it to the finesse players. The sport took him outside Fair Oaks, introducing him to other cultures and classes, and he has credited it for helping to shape his personality.
“Grit and grind and heart and hustle is a big part of who I am,” he said. “There’s so many life lessons built into soccer: overcoming adversity, winning with grace, losing with grace, winning as a team, helping each other, filling gaps, being better as a whole than you are as a collection of different parts.”
He made the U.S. men’s under-20 national team, and was recruited to play for Yale, where he was team captain and all-Ivy. At Yale, he was exposed to American wealth for the first time, and felt like a “fish out of water” and an impostor, he recalls.
“What are these private boarding schools everyone is so casually referencing? I’ve never heard of them,” he said. “There was a transition for sure. But I loved my experience there. I grew from it. It’s given me so much.”
His parents’ influence led him to politics. After graduating with honors, he spent a year studying government at Oxford, and then returned to Yale for law school.
Around 2004, his mother met Ron Wong, a political consultant who had started a boot camp for Asian Americans interested in getting into politics. She told him her son had gone to Yale and Oxford and was working in the San Francisco city attorney’s office.
“That’d be someone I’d want to talk to,” Wong recalls. Given Bonta’s formidable credentials, Wong was surprised to find him both open-minded and low-key. “He took the most notes and was the most tuned in on what he needed to do,” Wong said.
Many of California’s Asian American leaders have come through that boot camp, which provides training on the nuts-and-bolts of organizing, media relations, and messaging.
“It’s a very consistent narrative for him,” Wong said. “Like many people of color, he’s running for office to stand up for people who have been disenfranchised. His mother was an activist in the community. I think that is deeply embedded in his DNA.”
Bonta was elected to the Alameda City Council in 2010 and then to the state Assembly two years later, becoming the Legislature’s first member of Filipino heritage. Among his signature bills was a curriculum requirement to teach about the Filipino contribution to the farmworkers’ movement, an issue with powerful personal resonance that spoke to his sense of mission in public office.
“That time with the United Farm Workers — that time when people owned their power to fight for something different, something better, for justice, to push back against abuse and being wronged, and to do it together … that has always stayed with me,” he said. “I still believe in all that.”
According to CalMatters, he was one of the body’s most progressive members. On a 0-to-100 scale, from liberal to conservative, he got a score of 1.56 in 2019. His legislative record includes co-authoring a statewide rent stabilization law, the strongest renter protection bill in decades.
As attorney general, he has pursued cases not only against Paramount, but also against Amazon, Live Nation, Nexstar and many others. Last week, his office announced a $16.7 billion settlement with Meta over abuses related to children’s privacy on Facebook and Instagram.
“I believe in fairness. I believe in justice. I believe in following the rules,” he said. “That’s the mindset I take to all my work, and it applies also here. We’re not treating Paramount-Warner Bros. in any different way. It’s not special. It’s just the way I look at all my work.”
Bonta has repeatedly said that Paramount needs to accept “structural remedies” in order to resolve the case. Last week, the company said for the first time that it is open to that.
One suggestion, floated by the Directors Guild of America and IATSE, is that the studios could operate separately under common ownership. But Bonta said that would not be good enough. That, he said, is a “behavioral” remedy.
“There needs to be separate ownership,” he said. “If it’s under the same Paramount-Warner Bros. merged-entity roof, that’s not separate.”
Paramount has agreed not to close the transaction until after the trial, though it has tried to walk back that agreement by seeking a $1.9 billion bond from the states. Assuming that request is denied later this month, it appears that Bonta has the upper hand at least until next spring.
“We’re open to a conversation,” he said. “But I think we’ve been very clear about what we’re looking for.”
