CEO David Zaslav Poised To Get $567 million (!) Payout For Screwing Up Warner Brothers

I’ve written a lot about the AOL–>AT&T–>Time Warner–>Discovery mergers simply because I think they perfectly encapsulate the pointless, destructive incompetence at the heart of modern media consolidation, and the cannibalistic nature of Wall Street’s obsession with illusory quarterly growth propped up by smoke, mirrors, and complex accounting.

Ever since the original AOL Time Warner merger back in 2001, an endless wave of pointless mergers promised no limit of innovative “synergies,” but instead resulted in more than 50,000 layoffs, shittier product, higher prices, the death of a ton of well-loved brands and IPs, decades of chaos, a decline in quality journalism, and a bottomless well of shit.

At the heart of this enshittification (at least the more recent mergers involving AT&T and Discovery) has sat Warner Brothers CEO David Zaslav. Like the AT&T execs before him, Zaslav has seen absolutely zero accountability for this chaos, and, in fact, has been repeatedly rewarded with a series of massive compensation packages that in absolutely no way reflect his competency.

With Netflix and Paramount (CBS) now scrapping over the remnants of Warner Brothers’ carcass, Zaslav stands to cash out with a golden parachute for the ages. All told, it’s expected that Zaslav is set to see $567 million in cash and other buyout options:

“Zaslav will receive $30 million in “golden parachute” compensation, along with $537 million in equity, for a total of $567 million in a transaction-associated pay, per the Wednesday filing. Zaslav has led Warners since it formally merged with Discovery in 2022 following a $43 billion spinoff from then-owner AT&T.”

Now you might be inclined to say something like, “well he’s being justly compensated by the extraction class for his successful efforts to cannibalize the brand and usher it through a series of consolidative deals that were in the best interests of shareholders.”

But that’s not really true.

The endless chaos created by “growth for growth sake” mergers may provide temporary stock boosts and tax breaks, but it simultaneously has generated no limit of ill will among consumers (something Zaslav sometimes pretends to recognize), massive stock fluctuations, a huge talent drain, lots of wasted money and time, significant animosity among creatives, and significant harm to core brands (like HBO and CNN).

It’s the extraction class abusing the rules of the game to pretend to be good at business. They’re not actually building anything useful, or remotely interested in the longevity of the company, its customers, the talent that powers it, or the people who work there. They’re playing with funny numbers to try and perpetually generate the illusion of impossible permanent growth at incredible scale, then cashing out when the check finally comes due for their complicated shell games.

This, of course, won’t end here. Whichever company (CBS or Netflix) buys Warner Brothers will initially promise an ocean of new “consolidative synergies” before inevitably cutting, burning, and slashing resources, staff, and product quality to try and pay off debt from more pointless M&A and goose earnings frustrated by frustrated customer churn and saturated streaming growth.

Thanks to mindless deregulation of the markets and our adoration of artifice, there’s no financial incentive to do anything differently or learn from experience, which results in these folks engaging in the same behavior over and over again. At least until a truly severe market crash occurs, at which point, guys like Zaslav will be nowhere to be found and well insulated from the real-world harm they helped cause.