TO: All Mergers & Acquisitions Staff
FROM: Office of the Chief Legal Counsel
RE: Orders to stop playing games with the California Attorney General
We must address the sudden collapse of our federal antitrust settlement talks. Yesterday, the California Attorney General cancelled our meeting. He claimed we must stop playing games before he returns to the table. We now realize this was not a metaphor. Our negotiating team literally brought several physical board games to the conference room.
A Major Misunderstanding
"We thought a friendly round of Monopoly would ease the tension," said Lucinda Okonkwo-Bright, Director of Forward-Looking Regret at Meta, who currently consults on our transition. "Apparently, bankrupting the state's top lawyer on Boardwalk is bad strategy. He got very angry when we refused to mortgage our railroad utilities."
The Attorney General took offense to our competitive spirit. Staff members must immediately pack up all copies of Risk, Yahtzee, and Connect Four. We cannot secure our merger with Warner Bros. Discovery while hoarding all the developmental properties in Baltic Avenue.
New Rules of Engagement
"Our team also attempted a game of Operation to explain our corporate restructuring," said Marcus Bellweather, Senior VP of Playlist Emotional Intelligence. "We lost the Attorney General's trust when the buzzer sounded during the funny bone removal. We must stop playing games if we want this merger to survive."
Effective immediately, all future legal summits will feature zero dice. Do not pass go. Do not collect 111 billion dollars. Please return the silver top hat token to the lobby front desk.