Leaked LAEDC Study Puts a $21 Billion Price on Paramount Skydance Leaving California

A study by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation, dated September 10, 2026 and leaked to Politico, estimates that if PSKY relocated out of California the state would lose between $10.6 billion and $21.2 billion in annual economic output once the move was complete. The employment figure, which our earlier framing left vague, is 28,990 to 57,980 permanent full-time jobs statewide, with a nearer-term estimate of 2,750 to 5,550 job-years covering a partial relocation between October 2026 and September 2031.

The causal chain matters and is easy to get wrong. This is not a consequence of the merger closing. Paramount Skydance is threatening to leave California as leverage in the multistate attorneys-general antitrust suit against its pending $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, with an October 1, 2026 deadline attached. A separate Los Angeles County report from June 2026 dealt with a different and much smaller effect, roughly 4,500 Los Angeles jobs lost to post-merger consolidation. The two studies measure different things and should not be added together or used interchangeably.

The $21.2 billion is also a ceiling, not a point estimate, and it describes a steady state after a complete relocation rather than a one-time hit. Read it as the upper bound of a range whose lower bound is half as large.

For investors the relevant question is not the California economy but whether the threat works. A leaked study quantifying the political cost of losing a studio is itself a negotiating instrument, timed three weeks before the deadline. Watch whether the attorneys general settle before October 1, whether Paramount Skydance makes any formal relocation filing, and whether California responds with tax-credit concessions, which is the outcome a leak like this is usually engineered to produce.