The Brief

Netflix and Paramount are in One Big Battle After Another to buy the storied Hollywood studio Warner Bros. (Yes, One Battle After Another is a Warner Bros. movie).

This isn't the first time Warner Bros. has been at the center of headline-grabbing merger or acquisition. Actually, Warner Bros. has a long history of messy corporate marriages and divorces. It could be a cautionary tale about the dangers of mergers and acquisitions. You could even call it the Warner Bros. Curse.

Over the last decade alone, the Warner Bros. Curse has shown itself at least twice. In 2018, after a two-year regulatory battle, AT&T acquired what was then called Time Warner for $85.4 billion, and renamed the company WarnerMedia. Many believed AT&T overpaid for the company, and the stock market never seemed to really love this deal. WarnerMedia struggled to find big profits in streaming, its movie business was devastated by the pandemic, and the companies' cultures never really jibed with each other.

And so — in a deal that represented tens of billions of dollars in losses for its shareholders — AT&T sold shares and ceded control of WarnerMedia to Discovery Inc. The two officially merged in 2022, forming Warner Bros. Discovery, which is still this Frankenstein of a company's name (Frankenstein is another Warner Bros. property).

Since then, the company has made a series of bizarre decisions, like rebranding its streaming service HBO as HBO Max and then Max and then back to HBO Max. There were other debacles. Like, despite the movie being nearly done — and despite the fact they had spent nearly $90 million making it — Warner Bros. Discovery shelved BatGirl (and apparently wrote the loss off on their taxes). More recently, the company bought the rights to stream the show Mad Men, and as part of its release on the streaming platform, it sought to remaster the series into a widescreen, 4K format. But the production team apparently failed to do their due diligence and make sure it all looked good before releasing it. The result: those who watched Mad Men on HBO Max saw things like the production crew in the frame, including, in one scene, a technician holding a "vomit hose" as one of their actors pretended to throw up. This whole chapter of Warner Bros. history has proven to be, um, Looney Tunes.

Economists who study mergers and acquisitions have long puzzled over why so many corporate marriages go wrong. "Study after study puts the failure rate of mergers and acquisitions somewhere between 70% and 90%," wrote the legendary Harvard Business School scholar Clayton Christensen and colleagues in Harvard Business Review back in 2011. The story of Warner Bros. is a pretty interesting case study to get an understanding of why so many mergers and acquisitions fail.

The most glaring example of the Warner Bros. Curse happened at the turn of the millennium. It's widely considered to be one of the worst — if not the worst — mergers of all time. It was so bad that it's still studied in business schools.

Today in the Planet Money newsletter, we look at that disastrous merger. And we ponder some reasons why so many mergers and acquisitions fail.

The merger of the century

In October 1999, Steve Case, the CEO of America Online (AOL), made a fateful phone call to Gerald Levin, the CEO of Time Warner.

At the time, Case was only 41 years old, but, over the previous 15 years, he had built one of the most exciting companies in America. Before AOL, the internet was largely a place for geeks and bureaucrats. Case's company had made the internet accessible to tens of millions of normal Americans. In 1998, the company's popularity even inspired a zeitgeisty rom-com, You've Got Mail (which, you guessed it, was produced and distributed by Warner Bros.) In the midst of dotcom mania in the late 1990s, AOL's share price was rocketing through the stratosphere.

But Case was also worried. He was worried about mounting competition. He was worried that the stock market was in a speculative mania that wouldn't last. And he was worried what would happen to his company if there was a crash. AOL didn't really own much when it came to hard assets and the internet was changing fast. Case wanted to leverage his company's inflated share price, buy something big and tangible, diversify his company's business model, and secure a more resilient corporate future. Time Warner had serious appeal. For one, AOL was increasingly getting into the content game, and Time Warner offered exciting intellectual property to distribute. Even more, Case coveted Time Warner's sprawling network of cable lines, which would prove valuable as consumers ditched dial-up modems and adopted high-speed internet.

Gerald Levin, on the other hand, was disgruntled with the direction of his company. Time Warner was by then a sprawling media conglomerate which, after a series of mergers and acquisitions, controlled media entities like Time magazine, Warner Bros. Pictures, a record company, HBO, CNN, TBS, and Sports Illustrated. But his company's stock price was underperforming during the dotcom stock mania. He worried his company was failing to thrive at the dawn of the digital age. He was floundering while trying to usher in Time Warner's digital future in house, and he yearned for what he called another "transforming transaction" — a merger or acquisition — to revolutionize his company and secure his legacy.

When Case called Levin, he didn't beat around the bush. "Jerry? I've been thinking: we should put our two companies together. What do you think? Any interest?" he said, according to an excellent 2004 book by journalist Nina Munk, Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner.

Levin was interested, but he also played hard to get. "I don't think so, Steve. But I'll think about it," he reportedly said.

By then, Case had grown insanely rich, had a second marriage he wanted to preserve, and he had grown tired of the intensive work of being the CEO of his company. He was now hobnobbing with bigwigs at places like White House state dinners and the World Economic Forum in Davos, and he was on his way to a more cushy life as an investor, thinkfluencer, and philanthropist. Case was prepared to step down as CEO and take a less time-intensive role as chairman of the board, and he knew exactly what to say to Levin to pique his interest: Levin would take the helm of this new corporate juggernaut.

But Levin was still wary. And he had reason to be. Before he had become Time Warner's CEO, Levin had a long career in the lower rungs of its executive team. In late 1980s and early 1990s, when Time Inc. sought to merge with Warner Bros. (then known as Warner Communications) and form what would become Time Warner, the transaction encountered serious difficulties (the Warner Bros. Curse!). A company known as Gulf & Western — which would soon be renamed Paramount Communications, and today is known as Paramount Skydance — tried to stage a hostile takeover of Time Inc. (Sound familiar?) That hostile takeover ultimately failed, but it cost Time a lot of stress and money — and time — to avoid it, and Levin worried this was the beginning of another similar story.

After some back and forth over the next few weeks, Case and Levin decided to meet. They wanted this meeting to be a secret. So they rented a suite at a hotel in Manhattan, near Time Warner's headquarters, and spent an evening together.

They ordered room service for dinner, drank fancy wine, ate chocolate mousse, and dazzled each other. Through deep philosophical conversations about business and life, they decided they were simpatico. That night, they decided they would marry their two corporations, forming the world's largest media and entertainment company.

There were still thorny details to work out. Like, what percentage of shares in this new company would each side get? AOL had a stock market capitalization that was nearly double Time Warner's, and its stock price was growing much faster. But when it came to the meat and potatoes of actual revenue, Time Warner actually made much more money. And it had valuable assets, including a sprawling array of media properties and physical cable infrastructure. Levin wanted a 50-50 split in a new merged company. Case rejected 50-50. After months of negotiations, Levin ultimately settled on Time Warner getting 45% of their new, merged entity.

On January 10, 2000, AOL announced it was acquiring Time Warner for $182 billion. It was one of the largest — if not the largest — corporate mergers in history. When they officially merged, the two companies would be worth $350 billion. It was a wedding between old and new media, creating what looked like a power couple that would dominate the 21st century. Many analysts thought it was brilliant. The new company promised astounding rates of profit growth.

America Online Chairman Steve Case (L) and Time Warner Chairman Gerald Levin (R) announce their companies' merger Jan. 10, 2000 at a New York news conference. The new company will be called AOL Time Warner.

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A star-crossed marriage

But almost immediately, the marriage between AOL and Time Warner turned rocky. Levin had negotiated this deal while keeping much of Time Warner in the dark. He had treated his executives and his board of directors like a rubber stamp. Many felt the deal was rushed and sloppy. From the outset, many executives and employees were angry about the merger.

And, as the companies began to merge, AOL and Time Warner had big culture clashes. Time Warner was old school. Its board meetings were structured and formal. AOL meetings tended to be freeflowing and chaotic. Time Warner's divisions — from HBO to CNN to Warner Bros studios to its magazines — had operated autonomously. AOL wanted them to be under more centralized control, and pursue cross-platform advertising deals. AOL was obsessed with beating expectations, stoking investor excitement, and juicing their stock price. Time Warner executives were less obsessed with metrics and chasing short-term stock gains. Each side thought the other side knew nothing about their side of the business. There was a lot of animosity as the two teams became one.

Maybe it would have all worked out in a rosier market. However, as luck would have it, the two companies negotiated their deal just three months before the peak of the dotcom bubble: March 10, 2000. After that, the bubble started to deflate. It would still be almost a year until federal regulators would approve this deal and make the proposed merger official. In the meantime, AOL's stock began sinking.

The whole deal between Time Warner and AOL was predicated on an explosive rate of growth at AOL. But as the stock market crashed and the economy turned sour, companies began cutting back on advertising. Advertising was crucial to AOL's business (and also Time Warner's). Meanwhile, AOL's new subscriber growth began to slow down. And AOL's stock descent picked up pace.

By January 11, 2001, when federal regulators officially approved of the merger, AOL Time Warner was already in serious trouble. But things got much worse after the spring of 2001, when America officially entered a recession. Then came 9/11, and the economy got even worse.

The newly formed AOL Time Warner went into panic mode as their business soured. The company began doing share buybacks, trying to signal to the market that their stock was undervalued (even as its top executives sold shares). They laid off thousands of employees and began making drastic cuts. They got super petty about employee expenses, like eliminating free soda and forcing employees to buy from vending machines. Worst of all, AOL executives resorted to cooking their books, trying to make it seem like their advertising revenue was solid when really it wasn't.

The bad news for AOL Time Warner kept mounting. Fighting over what the company should do, the bromance between Case and Levin turned to man-imosity, and Case began rallying their board against Levin.

The writing was on the wall. On December 5, 2001, Levin announced he was going to go into early retirement. "I'd never cried before," Levin told Nina Munk, when she was writing her 2004 book about this corporate fiasco. "I'd never cried. And now I cry all the time."

With Levin exiting, a civil war broke out within the company. The two sides hated each other. Levin's replacement as CEO, Richard Parsons, would later tell The New York Times, "It was beyond certainly my abilities to figure out how to blend the old media and the new media culture. They were like different species, and in fact, they were species that were inherently at war."

In the summer of 2002, The Washington Post got a scoop that — both before and after its merger with Time Warner — AOL had been essentially cooking the books, pretending that it was getting more ad and other revenue than it really was. That story inspired lawsuits and investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and AOL Time Warner's stock price went into a free fall.

By the end of this fiasco, over $200 billion in shareholder value had been wiped out (over $350 billion in today's dollars). The company was forced to pay big fines. AOL Time Warner ended up firing basically every senior AOL executive. Under pressure, Steve Case resigned as the board chairman. In 2003, AOL Time Warner dropped AOL from its name and, in 2009, officially separated from it. (AOL is still around; an Italian tech company called "Bending Spoons" recently announced it was buying it for $1.5 billion).

What is today called Warner Bros. Discovery still bears the scars — including billions of dollars in debt — from its disastrous merger a quarter century ago.

Netflix promises it will avoid the Warner Bros. Curse

Interestingly, Netflix executives, with their eyes set on acquiring Warner Bros., recently promised Wall Street that, basically, don't worry, we won't fall victim to the Warner Bros. Curse like so many have before us.

"A lot of those failures that we've seen historically is because the company that was doing the acquisition didn't understand the entertainment business," said Greg Peters, co-CEO of Netflix, on a recent call with Wall Street analysts, according to Deadline. "They didn't really understand what they were buying. We understand these assets that we're buying, the things that are critical in Warner Bros. are key businesses that we operate in, and we understand. A lot of times, the acquiring company, it was a legacy non-growth business that was looking for sort of a lifeline. That doesn't apply to us. We've got a healthy, growing business that we're super, super excited about."

But their potential merger with Warner Bros is already off to a rocky start. Paramount is attempting a hostile takeover. The two are now involved in a battle that could prove to be an intense bidding war, increasing the chances that Warner Bros. could be involved in another ill-fated merger.

What causes so many mergers and acquisitions to fail? One big reason is that the buyers tend to overpay for what they're acquiring. There are a lot of potential reasons for that. One is related to something we wrote about in a recent newsletter and covered in The Indicator. Behavioral economists have long observed that winners in auctions — or really any market where people competitively bid against each other for something — are often the ones who overpay for what they're buying. They call it "the winner's curse." In other words, the winning bidders often win precisely because they are the ones who most overestimate the value of what they're buying.

At heart, corporate leaders may overpay in mergers and acquisitions because they're bad at judging what those companies — and what those companies and their companies combined — will actually be worth. There's a well-known insight in personal finance that people, for the most part, shouldn't pick and choose individual stocks. The basic idea is that stock prices already reflect available information, and it's hard to beat the market. Maybe that extends even to many CEOs and expert executive teams buying or selling companies.

If you're a company seeking to buy another company, "[y]ou are almost always going to pay more – often significantly more – than the firm is currently worth," writes Melissa Schilling, a scholar at the NYU Stern School of Business. "If you didn't, the target's current owners wouldn't sell. Their outside option is always to hold or sell to another bidder at a higher price. That means your acquisition is only going to pay off if you know something the market doesn't know, or you can do something significantly better with that firm's assets than its current owners are doing."

Apparently, that is really hard to do. But cocky executives often think they know something that the market doesn't, and they may overestimate the actual 'synergies' that can be found when two companies become one. Ultimately, they may overvalue what they're buying or merging to create.

Or maybe company leaders sometimes do foresee the real value, but it's for themselves, and not necessarily for their employees or shareholders. In a 2022 book, titled The Merger Mystery, scholars Geoff Meeks and J. Gay Meeks, both of the University of Cambridge, argue that "misaligned incentives" between executives and their companies is one common reason why, despite a high failure rate, so many corporate leaders are so gung-ho to do mergers and acquisitions. Basically, company leaders and advisors can often make huge sums of money from M&A transactions — kind of like Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav has in the transactions he's been involved with — even if those transactions ultimately fail to boost their company's profits and serve their shareholders and employees.

The benefits for corporate bigwigs pushing for mergers and acquisitions goes beyond just money. For example, it can also be quite an ego boost to suddenly be in charge of a much bigger company or control something that gets lots of public attention.

Meanwhile, dealmaking like this is often hindered by what economists call asymmetric information. When different parties in a deal have unequal information about the thing that is being bought or sold, it can lead to mispricing and market failures. For instance, maybe the troubles at AOL were more apparent to insiders with intimate knowledge about their company's performance. Had Time Warner gotten better information about the company they were forming a relationship with — and not rushed through their due diligence in prodding and poking the deal — maybe they would have killed the deal or structured it differently.

There are many other potential reasons why mergers and acquisitions can go wrong. But the story of AOL and Time Warner's disastrous merger really highlights how the actual work of making two companies into one can be really messy. Culture clashes, personal animosities, and the headaches of implementing new processes, structures, and strategies can be demoralizing to employees and hurt a newly merged company's performance, detracting from the synergies that the companies were originally hoping for.

We look forward to seeing how this new sequel to the decades-old franchise of Warner Bros. mergers and acquisitions turns out. Sure, it could prove to be like The Dark Knight, a commercial and critical success. However, there is a big risk it could be more like Joker: Folie à Deux, another Warner Bros. flop.
Copyright 2025 NPR

James L. Jones Jr., 69, a self-described “community pastor” and a tireless advocate for Black communities in Los Angeles, was an enthusiastic supporter of Karen Bass’ mayoral bid in 2022, when she made history as the first woman, and first Black woman, to be elected L.A. mayor.

As Bass seeks reelection, Jones is supporting her again. Despite the political turmoil and criticism she has faced during her first term, Jones, known as Reverend JJ, believes she has a plan for Black progress that may not be evident, but is long range and strategic.

“I believe that in my heart of hearts, Karen’s not one of those people who follows polls,” said Jones. “In the end she’ll do what’s right for the people.”

When Angelenos elected Bass four years ago, she seemed like the right person to bridge the ideals of the post-George Floyd era and whatever moment was coming next. She was a seasoned politician — a former state legislator, congresswoman and native Angeleno with a history of grassroots organizing and coalition building in a city that was leaning more progressive.

But in 2022, there was trouble on the horizon. The nation’s Floyd-inspired reexamination of racial equity was losing ground to a growing MAGA backlash that had helped kill a major federal bill to reform policing, among other initiatives. Big blue cities like Los Angeles that had seen big protests for racial justice were being cast as chaotic and ungovernable.

Four years later, the ideals that propelled Bass’ election have taken a beating. Trump’s return to the White House has elevated long-simmering anti-“wokeness” and white resentment into federal policy. And the administration has focused special ire on California and Los Angeles, where Bass is in charge of the nation’s largest city currently led by a Black mayor.

Bass is taking a beating too. As she seeks reelection in the June 2 primary, the mayor is weathering criticism from many sides that she’s done too little about everything, from the homelessness and housing crisis that she made a signature issue to her response to the epic January 2025 wildfire that destroyed thousands of homes in Pacific Palisades, one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods.

Despite facing more voter uncertainty this time around, Bass is leading in the polls, with 30% support among likely voters, according to the latest survey by Emerson College Polling/Inside California Politics. While Bass’ support has jumped 10 points since March, she would have to get more than 50% of the vote to avoid a runoff with the other top vote-getter in November.

Her most formidable challengers in the crowded primary are Councilwoman Nithya Raman, a Democratic socialist to Bass’ left who is campaigning on housing affordability and a host of other progressive causes, and Spencer Pratt, a former reality show star with no political experience who skews conservative and touts cleaning up crime and homelessness. A former Bass ally, Raman pledges to do better than the mayor on reducing homelessness and increasing new housing production; Pratt decries corrupt leadership and talks chiefly about making L.A. great again, a la MAGA. Pratt and Raman are polling at 22% and 19%, respectively.

Missing from all the criticism of how Bass has fallen short is how or whether her election has benefited L.A.’s Black community. It’s a population that is rapidly continuing to dwindle — to roughly 8% today from a peak of 18% in 1970 — besieged by gentrification, stratospheric housing costs, underemployment and shrinking political representation, all of it aggravated by the racial hostility emanating from Washington. That norm-shattering phenomenon has tended to eclipse discussion of racial crises happening locally, with good reason. But politics are still local, and many Angelenos who supported Bass in 2022 hoped that electing the second Black mayor in the city’s history would help move the needle on longstanding Black problems dating back to 1992 that have reached yet another inflection point.

But public assessments of Bass by Black leaders the last four years, including this election cycle, have been muted to nonexistent. The exception is Black Lives Matter Grassroots L.A., which has routinely taken her to task for increasing police funding instead of allocating more resources to social and other services — a core part of the post-George Floyd reforms. Observers say the reticence among Black leaders is partly due to the fact that Bass has been so inundated with crises, some not of her making — especially the Palisades fire. The view that Bass committed a fatal mistake by being on a diplomatic trip to Ghana when the fires broke out has more or less defined her politically since.

That’s unfair, said Michael Guynn, a veteran social worker and community activist who lives near Florence and Normandie avenues, a famous site of the 1992 racial unrest.

“I don’t give a damn if she was out of the country — she got back when she could,” Guynn said. “They blamed her for what the fire department was responsible for.”

Then there’s the racism that dogs Black elected officials, women in particular. Pratt, who lost his home in the Palisades fire last year, has invoked Donald Trump-like rhetoric to belittle L.A.’s first Black woman mayor. That includes an official campaign poster that depicts Bass stuffed in a trash can and says “throw out Karen Basura,” the Spanish word for trash, echoing Trump’s disparaging of Somali immigrants — a demographic that includes Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar — as “garbage.”

But the takedown isn’t only coming from the MAGA right, said Genethia Hudley-Hayes, former president of L.A.’s civilian Fire Commission and a Bass appointee who stepped down in March.

“There’s always the bigotry of, ‘We rallied around this Black woman and she hasn’t performed,’” said Hudley-Hayes. “She’s not a superwoman. That’s part of the ‘I’m mad’ vote in L.A.”

Another hurdle for Bass, Guynn said, is the unrealistic expectation that she would dramatically reduce or even eliminate homelessness.

“She couldn’t get a fair break because of that,” he said, adding that “everybody hates homelessness and wants it to go away, but nobody wants to do the work.”

Homelessness certainly qualifies as a Black concern: 32% of unhoused people in the city are African American, according to the city’s latest count. Bass’ signature program Inside Safe, which seeks to get people off the street and into temporary housing, has made inroads. But the mayor’s efforts have been hampered by what City Hall observers say is a larger problem of messaging, management and oversight. The scandal involving a subcontractor accused of defrauding the city’s homeless services authority of $23 million is a painful reminder of that.

Hudley-Hayes says that it points to the need for the mayor of L.A. to be a skilled executive, a skill that Bass doesn’t have, at least not yet.

“You need collaboration, which is different from coalition building, different from the activism of Community Coalition,” she said, referring to the grassroots South L.A. organization co-founded by Bass.

Deep understanding of the roles of not just the 41 city departments but of bigger entities like the county is essential not just for running the city but for effecting racial justice as well.

“Homelessness is important, but you have to ask, what are the structures that create homelessness? It’s not just a city problem but a regional problem,” said Hudley-Hayes. “Inside Safe is a program, not a strategy.”

But being a better executive wouldn’t automatically guarantee improvements for Black people. Tom Bradley, who was mayor from 1973 to 1993, is venerated both as a coalition builder and astute manager who improved many parts of the city. But he didn’t do enough for L.A.’s Black populace. While the Black middle class flourished during the Bradley years, in part because Black municipal employment flourished, the larger working class and poor in South L.A. did not.

Hudley-Hayes argues the mayor’s lack of accountability to L.A.’s Black population as a whole is longstanding, and not unique to elected officials like Bradley or Bass. Local branches of civil rights groups like the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference — which Hudley-Hayes once led — also play a part in accountability, though they have declined notably over the years. But Hudley-Hayes notes that accountability works two ways.

“Black people have individual agency, but we have to exercise it together,” she said. “We have to pool our experience. It means nothing if we don’t demand what we want.”

Even — especially — in these trying times, and in a city with as much possibility as L.A., problems notwithstanding — those demands should still matter.

Copyright Capital & Main 2026

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Walmart will likely put its tariff refunds toward lowering store prices, executives said on Thursday, as they described shoppers who are increasingly anxious about the rising cost of fuel.

In recent weeks, visitors to Walmart's gas stations have begun to fill up with fewer than ten gallons for the first time since 2022, Chief Financial Officer John David Rainey told investors on an earnings call.

"That's an indication of stress," he said.

"We see with our customers that the high-income customer is spending with confidence," Rainey added later, "while the lower-income consumer is more budget-conscious and perhaps navigating financial distress."

The U.S. government last week began refunding tariffs payments to importers that paid higher customs fees imposed by President Trump last year before the Supreme Court struck down most of them. Walmart is now the largest retailer to suggest that it will put those refunds toward potential price cuts.

"We think that the single best return that we can have on a dollar of capital right now is to investment in the customer, invest in price," Rainey said, noting that Walmart's stores and gas stations have been drawing more shoppers looking for deals. U.S. sales grew 4.1% from February through April.

Shoppers' slightly bigger tax refunds this year seem to be offsetting some of the budget pain so far. That's according to rival retailers Home Depot, Target and Lowe's, which also held earnings calls this week. Sales at all three companies grew in the latest quarter.

The latest federal data shows spending at retail stores and online grew 5.2% in April compared to a year earlier, surpassing inflation. That means people may have spent more because of higher prices, but also because they bought more things. At gas stations, spending surged a whopping 21%, driven by higher gas prices.

Walmart executives warned that persistently high gas costs would eventually drive up the prices shoppers see at stores.

The U.S. war with Iran has snarled tanker passage through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital corridor for shipments of both fuel and fertilizer needed to grow food. U.S. inflation already jumped to its highest level in three years in April, with energy prices being a big driver. The average U.S. price of regular gas on Thursday was $4.56 per gallon, according to AAA. That's up $1.38 from a year ago.

So far, major retailers have been absorbing their growing transportation and shipping costs. Walmart on Thursday reported a notable hit to its income from higher fuel expenses. Home Depot executives told investors on Tuesday that the company might use its own tariff refunds to offset its mounting fuel costs.
Copyright 2026 NPR

With less than a month before the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup kicks off, soccer fans are scrambling to grab the last remaining tickets.

At the time of publication, there are still some tickets available for the six World Cup games hosted at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara.

But while the Bay Area hasn’t yet experienced the kind of ticket frenzy seen in other World Cup host cities, prices are still out of reach for many fans — raising concerns about how fans looking for a bargain could fall prey to scams falsely promising far cheaper tickets.

And most recently, the World Cup’s own governing body, FIFA, has drawn scrutiny from California state officials over changes to its ticketing system — following reports from ticketholders who say they have been assigned seats in a different category than advertised when they bought their tickets through FIFA’s own online portal.

“We have laws in California against misleading or deceptive business practices,” said state Attorney General Rob Bonta, who sent a letter to FIFA last week requesting a list of ticket buyers who were assigned seats in a lower category than what they purchased. “We want to learn more from FIFA in order to assess whether what was done was lawful or not.”

Bonta also expressed concern that sky-high prices could deter people from buying a ticket through FIFA’s official website or other verified vendors. Passionate soccer fans, he said, “may go into a site that isn’t as reliable and maybe they get taken advantage of.”

An Adidas FIFA World Cup soccer ball is seen on a FIFA x NFL chair in the Media Center on Feb. 4, 2026 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

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So how can you spot a scam when buying a World Cup ticket, or just make sure you get what you pay for?

Keep reading to learn what officials recommend about buying World Cup tickets online and what to do if you already bought a ticket on the official FIFA site but feel that the seat you were assigned does not match what you originally paid for.

And rest assured: there are still plenty of ways to watch the World Cup in the Bay Area for free — or for a fraction of the cost of a Levi’s Stadium ticket, real or fake.

Remember, if something’s too good to be true …

First off: If you’re feeling confused over what a World Cup ticket actually costs, that’s understandable, Santa Clara County Assistant District Attorney James Gibbons-Shapiro said.

For this World Cup, FIFA adopted a pricing system known as “dynamic pricing,” where the cost of a seat changes based on current demand for that specific game.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup winner’s trophy is seen on stage at the Global Citizen NOW event in New York City on May 14, 2026.

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Scammers often promise you “a better deal” if you make the payment using instant payment sites like Zelle, Venmo and Cash App. But fraudsters aren’t trying to save you money with this suggestion: They’re trying to make it easier for themselves to keep your money.

Talking to strangers on a resale or payments site that’s not verified puts you at greater risk of getting ripped off, Gibbons-Shapiro said. “The criminal is simply looking for someone desperate enough to go to the World Cup that they’re willing to send a lot of money right away to a total stranger,” he said.

In other words, he said: “It’s not that the country that you are supporting is going to lose — it’s going to be you that loses.”

How do I know if the World Cup tickets I’m being offered are real?

Scammers have become incredibly good at printing fake tickets that look highly realistic, Gibbons-Shapiro said. So much so, he said, that when sports fans ask him for advice on how to spot a fake ticket, he tells them that he doesn’t have any tips that reliably work — that’s how identical the scam tickets can physically appear.

The real pro tip here, Gibbons-Shapiro said, is “don’t go to the stadium to try to buy a ticket there.”

“Because the great likelihood is that you’re buying a fake ticket,” he said. “You’re not gonna be able to get in, and you’re going to lose all your money.”

Scalpers are actually not permitted on stadium grounds — and reselling tickets near the stadium is a misdemeanor crime in California.

That’s why it’s important to buy your ticket on a third-party ticket resale site that will deliver the ticket directly to you.

Footballs and jerseys are displayed during the opening day of the official 2026 FIFA World Cup merchandising store in Miami Beach, Florida, on May 18, 2026

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Platforms like WhatsApp or Facebook Marketplace usually will not verify if what’s being offered is what’s actually sold.

And even if you’re using reliable third-party sites like SeatGeek or TicketMaster, check the reseller’s refund policy to see whether they offer a guarantee regarding the authenticity and timely arrival of the tickets.

I just got scammed buying a fake World Cup ticket. What can I do?

First of all, make sure to document all your communication with the person who promised to sell you a ticket — and take screenshots of those messages in case they attempt to delete anything from their end of the conversation.

If you were scammed online or over the phone:

You can then report the situation to your local police department, as the city where you live is defined as where the crime took place.

If you bought the fake ticket in person from a scalper: 

Contact the police department of the city where the transaction took place. “If that happened right outside the stadium, that would be Santa Clara Police Department,” Gibbons-Shapiro said.

You can also file a complaint with the California Attorney General’s office or the Better Business Bureau.

Gibbons-Shapiro said his office is ready to prosecute anyone who tricks others into buying fake World Cup tickets, adding that he would consider that to be a felony.

“We have robust teams for consumer protection and theft enforcement,” he said. “We’re going to prosecute the scammers.”

I bought a ticket on the FIFA website, and I think I got seated in a different place than what I paid for.

If you bought your ticket from the online FIFA purchasing portal during the initial sales phase last October, Attorney General Bonta recommends that you keep a record of everything from that purchase. This could include, he said, “images of the map they were shown and the original receipt for the ticket that they purchased and what it says, and the existing ticket that they have.”

You can also contact Bonta’s office to share your experience.

Bonta told KQED his office is still investigating what happened during this initial ticketing phase and hopes that FIFA provides the information he has requested by the May 29 deadline. “And if they don’t, we can ratchet up the level of severity here,” he said.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta speaks at a news conference in front of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco on Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024. (

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Terry Chea

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Associated Press

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“It’s not something that we want to do, but we always have an ability to send civil investigative demands or subpoenas,” Bonta said.

FIFA did not respond to a request for comment from KQED. However, the organization has told other media outlets that the initial maps consumers saw last year were meant to “provide guidance rather than the exact seat layout,” and seating arrangements could be subject to change — as happened when the organization introduced new seating categories in later phases of ticket sales.

But that could potentially be in violation of California law, Bonta said.

“The law in California is that businesses and organizations cannot justify misleading practices by pointing to the fine print or other terms that an everyday reasonable consumer would not have seen or understood,” he said. “If you’re told something, then you’re entitled to rely on the representation and to trust what you were told.”

The attorney general’s office could seek some civil penalty if its investigation concludes that the rights of California consumers were indeed violated, Bonta said. “Then we could help those individuals get the ticket that they actually purchased, not the one that they received after they were misled.”

But the investigation is still ongoing, he said.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

At the five-point intersection connecting Boyle Heights and East LA, one Memorial Day tradition has brought the communities together for 80 years.

The Memorial Day tribute at the Mexican American All Wars Memorial returns Monday, giving veterans and their families a space to honor service members of Mexican descent who died in war.

The event kicks off with a 24-hour vigil starting at 10 a.m. Sunday, when veterans will stand guard through the night ahead of Monday’s annual event.

“Memorial Day in Boyle Heights and East LA is way different than any other memorial or ceremony because there were a lot of men and women who went to World War II and Vietnam from this area,” said Joe Diaz, a co-organizer for the event.

Elected officials, including LA County Supervisor Hilda Solis, Senator Maria Elena Durazo and Council District 14 Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, are set to give remarks. LA Mayor Karen Bass is also expected to attend. 

LAPD officer and military veteran Kioni Smith is set to be the keynote speaker. A flyover from the Los Angeles Police Department Air Support Division and a colorguard performance are also scheduled. 

Cinco Puntos was the starting location of the first Chicano Moratorium, a march in protest of the Vietnam War on December 20, 1969, according to the Los Angeles Conservancy. The war memorial pays tribute to the strong presence of the veteran community on the Eastside, the L.A. Conservancy adds. 

Event Details:

The 80th Memorial Day ceremony at the Mexican-American All Wars Memorial in Boyle Heights.

Location: 3300 E. Cesar E. Chavez Avenue

Time: 10 to 11 a.m.