After Endless Layoffs And Chaos, Time Warner Discovery Splits Back Into Two Lesser, Unremarkable Companies

We’ve well documented how the AOL–>AT&T->Warner Brothers->Discovery series of mergers were among some of the most destructive and pointless “business deals” ever conceived by modern man. Just decades of “savvy deal-making” that resulted in an increasingly shittier product.

The mergers resulted in bottomless layoffs, the closure of numerous valuable and popular brands and shows, and much worse product as incompetent, fail-upward executives shifted the company’s focus away from quality programming toward lowest-common-denominator engagement slop.

After endless chaos, the companies are effectively unwinding the original deal, splitting the media giant back into two companies: Warner Bros. and Discovery Global. The actually semi-valuable stuff — including HBO, HBO Max streaming, and their gaming properties will be part of a slimmed-down Warner Bros.

The more problematic albatross around the company’s neck, its dying cable networks (including TNT, CNN, HGTV and Animal Planet) will be spun off into Discovery Global. This will, violently overcompensated CEO David Zaslav insists, continue a legacy of excellence at the media giant:

“We will proudly continue the more than century-long legacy of Warner Bros. through our commitment to bringing culture-defining stories, characters and entertainment to audiences around the world,” Zaslav said.”

Part of this proud legacy, you might recall, included sidelining the HBO brand, which Zaslav initially claimed reflected a savvy evolution in the company’s thinking. Executives believed that the “the HBO name turns off many potential subscribers,” so they renamed their streaming service “Max” in the belief this would give them a fresh branding start.

But the name changes were so fast and frequent they befuddled even the company’s own employees.

Executives like Zaslav are all out of any sort of original ideas, assuming they had any in the first place. The kind of stuff that truly pleases customers (low prices, higher quality, improved customer support, better feature sets) costs money and erodes quarterly earnings and the goal of impossible growth.

So instead, these executives have embraced a purely extractive “growth for growth’s sake” mindset in which they pursue purposeless consolidation whose only function is to temporarily goose stock valuations, provide big tax cuts, and flimsily justify outsized compensation for fail-upward brunchlord media executives who fancy themselves savvy dealmakers (see the Ellison family and CBS).

And there’s been an entire generation of this, if you extend your view back to the original, equally disastrous AOL deal back in 2001. When the press covers these pointless deals, they very rarely think it’s worth mentioning the generation worth of carnage and layoffs this sort of consolidation always creates; a tone-deafness that itself is a direct result of consolidation and bad management.

Zaslav has stated repeatedly that he sees Trump 2.0 as an opportunity for more harmful media consolidation, which will only continue to make the underlying products worse. Wash, rinse, repeat, with absolutely nobody learning anything from the experience thanks to all manner of perverse financial incentives that have nothing to do with building real value or making your customers happy.