David Zaslav Will Soon Get $550 Million For Disastrous Warner Bros Reign
Brunchlords can only fail upward. It’s physics.
Warner Brothers CEO David Zaslav is poised to get as much as $550 million in compensation and tax reimbursement as the company prepares to be acquired by Larry Ellison’s CBS/Paramount:
“Zaslav, president and CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, is set to receive $34.2 million in cash severance; $517.2 million in equity in the combined company; and $44,195 in continued health coverage reimbursement benefits, per a WBD filing with the SEC.”
The Wall Street Journal suggests his payout could top $800 million, though I think they’re double counting potential tax reimbursement.
Zaslav oversaw years of dysfunction during the last wave of pointless Warner Brothers mergers, which included thousands of brutal layoffs, consistent creative infighting, endlessly higher prices, cancelled programming, and a steady wave of overall dysfunction. And that’s before we even get to this latest merger with Paramount, which is expected to see more layoffs and chaos than ever.
Variety, as is generally the tendency for Hollywood trade mags, can’t be bothered to mention literally any of the real world consumer and labor costs of pointless consolidation. That’s just not of interest to editors there. They can’t even muster the interest to suggest Zaslav’s reign was controversial or that his payout might not be commensurate with any sort of actual real world competency.
If you visit the comment section of this story however, you can tell the public has… thoughts. You can find the same lack of interest in real world labor and consumer harms (and the public’s seething, palpable anger) at outlets like Deadline.
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, pointless consolidation has 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 at places like CNN, and a bottomless well of shit.
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, nor are they 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.
Now, we’re poised to see what could be the grand master of dysfunction with the Ellison family’s whopping $110 billion acquisition, backed heavily by Saudi cash. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to predict this latest deal could make all the past chaos and dysfunction look positively adorable. And at some point, the entire shell game will come crashing to the ground, with guys like Zaslav nowhere to be found.