Warner Bros. Discovery Investors Balk At CEO Zaslav Getting Another Fat Raise As Company Unwinds Disastrous And Pointless Megamerger
from the fail-upward-trust-fund-brunchlords dept
You might recall how the Warner Brothers Discovery merger promised everyone amazing new synergies for the media sector. Instead it wound up being a giant sloppy turd of a deal resulting in endless layoffs, the shuttering of numerous popular media brands, the cancellation of a long line of popular programming, higher consumer prices, and lower product quality from HBO to CNN.
The man in charge of this hot mess, CEO David Zaslav, has steadily been rewarded for his incompetence with gigantic, ever-escalating pay packages that never reflect his lack of real-world competence.
Warner Bros. Discovery lost $11.5 billion last year. The company is in the process of firing another round of workers for its executives mistakes. Its streaming service increasingly consists of reality TV slop and C-tier content. The merger was so pointless, and traditional cable TV channels are so worthless, Time Warner and Discovery are planning to unwind the disastrous partnership:
“Warner Bros. Discovery, the film and TV colossus behind HBO and CNN, announced on Monday that it would cleave itself into two companies, separating its cable networks and streaming businesses.”
The NYT coverage of the split only faintly hints at Zaslav’s incompetence, and doesn’t even mention the word “layoffs” despite another round hitting only just last week.
They’re currently squabbling over how to split the debt between the two “new” companies, created predominately by the pointless merger. At the same time, Zaslav is poised to get a massive $52 million pay package, comprised of a cash bonus of $23.9 million and $23.1 million in performance-based restricted stock grants. Zaslav will continue to lead the company’s most important assets: its streaming business and movie studios.
Company investors are increasingly raising eyebrows at Zaslav’s pay package, recently issuing a symbolic vote against Zaslav’s outsized compensation. Zaslav will get paid anyway, but the CEO is seeing increased criticism, even in media trade magazines like Variety that tend to soft sell executive incompetence, labor abuses, and outsized executive compensation for fear of losing access.
A major justification by the Warner Bros. Discovery board for Zaslav’s pay package was the savings Zaslav created through mindless consolidation and layoffs, Variety notes:
“One of those goals for Zaslav was to “Complete integration pipeline; Implement cost controls to adjust cost to serve in declining linear [TV] revenue environment.” On this front, Zaslav “Achieved incremental cost savings of $1.8B in 2024, significantly overdelivering against internal goal,” according to the WBD compensation committee. (Those savings were achieved in part through major layoffs.) The committee determined Zaslav had met the outlined strategic goals at 115% of his target.”
But executives like Zaslav are purely extractive animals. They temporarily goose stock valuations and generate tax breaks by cannibalizing their own brands through pointless consolidation that may save a little money through cuts, layoffs, and illusory “synergies,” but very clearly harm the overall survivability of the brand and longer term quality.
Zaslav has made it very clear that he sees more media consolidation coming under Trumpism, which will rubber stamp your problematic mergers provided you demonstrate to the king that you’re suitably racist and promise that your reporters won’t engage in any serious journalism critical of the regime.
That means more price hikes and bad decisions are right over the horizon as the company pursues impossible growth through bottomless price hikes, even more layoffs, and further quality erosion. Distorted financial motivations made possible by financial shell games ensure nobody learns from experience or faces accountability for decisions harmful to workers, employees, or the brand.
Filed Under: consolidation, david zaslav, executive compensation, journalism, media, mergers
Companies: warner bros. discovery
Comments on “Warner Bros. Discovery Investors Balk At CEO Zaslav Getting Another Fat Raise As Company Unwinds Disastrous And Pointless Megamerger”
I almost gave in.
I was considering getting the Disney/Hulu/Max deal. Then this hit. I’ll take a double scoop of NOPE instead.
So he is justified a pay raise because he saved 1.8 Billion laying off people but not held accountable for causing losses of almost 12 billion… Make it make sense!
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It’s quite simple: The people responsible for his compensation package are just as interested in exploiting the poor for their own benefit as the CEO is. Modern corporations are vehicles to make the wealthy wealthier, not to provide a beneficial product/service to consumers or jobs for workers.
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Sure, they want to extract as much money from people as possible, without caring about workers or customers. BUT THEY LOST $12 BILLION! I would think they would care about that!
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Insert some meme here about the temporarily embarrassed billionaire.
Either that, or it wasn’t their $12 billion at stake.
Or they had enough billions to just ignore.
Rich people have a depressing number of fallback plans.
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It’s bound to turn up, eventually. Did you check behind the sofa cushions?
After all, this AOL merger is going to save Time-Warner now that everyone is upgrading from cable modems to dial-up!
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I can’t exactly do that, but if you think of Zaslav as a politician, you may see some parallels. When anything good happens, it’s obviously the current top person’s work (even if the timing suggests it must have been a predecessor). Anything bad, it’s the result of policies set by a previous administration.
Remember that these people are all on each other’s boards. If you don’t know how to play this game, to increase all of your paychecks way beyond anything reason would support, the others will never vote you into the top positions.
They can split and then merge with other outfits. Wins all around for 2 or 3 guys, nice.
They created such lean and dynamic synergies! The consensus is, it was a results driven merger that caused a paradigm shift. They just need to find a new strategic shift of their core competencies so they can become lean and mean. Huzzah, raises all around!
We do have terms for this that are equally appropriate while also being more colorful.
Parasite. Cancer. Thief.
When do we eat, btw? I’m feeling a bit peckish.
No surprise...
The way CEO’s are paid should be no surprise. Look up the board membership of any major public corporation – it’s online – and the “independent members” are overwelmingly CEO’s (or former CEO’s and chairmen) of other major companies who – obviously – feel that CEO should be a highly rewarded position. Rarely does perfomance enter into it, unless it comes down to extraordinary performance deserves not just the usual tens of millions but even more bonus.
This is how we end up with CEO’s paid hundred to thousands times the average pay of the front-line employees.
david zaslov can go fuck himself
any regular person loses $12 billion and he or she is gonna get hit with fraud and embezzlement investigations. theyre also gonna get decades in prison. zaslov loses $12 billion and he gets a pay hike. ceos should get the same exact treatment. nobody asked for discivery to launder $45 billion on a useless merger
Enshittification ensues no matter what
That deal blows no matter what is happening with HBO/Max/HBO Max.
Wait until all the episodes of your show(s) are released, sign up for the trial and binge. Cancel it out when complete.
Or sail the 7 seas. ← (this is a joke, wink, wink, nudge, nudge; say no more, say no more)
Either way, you won’t get stuck paying for drek you never watch just for the sliver of content you actually want.