David Zaslav Will Soon Get $550 Million For Disastrous Warner Bros Reign
from the dipshits-and-golden-parachutes dept
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.
Filed Under: consolidation, david zaslav, executives, golden parachute, journalism, larry ellison, media, mergers
Companies: paramount, warner bros. discovery
Comments on “David Zaslav Will Soon Get $550 Million For Disastrous Warner Bros Reign”
That’s like 3 bucks for every time the HBO streaming app changed it’s name!
I wish I got paid hefty amounts of cash if I screw up at my job. Instead, most of us will just get fired. But hey, shareholders profit?
A question of when...
I think that Larry Ellison’s CBS/Paramount is a purpose-built media empire to support Trump. It does not seem like a truly viable company in the long-term.
Assuming that the US is able to even begin righting this sinking ship of democracy in the mid-terms and then in 2028 or Trump kicks the bucket, this company will be broken up and sold-off.
That is why his nepo baby son is involved. This is his one chance to pretend he is a big boy.
Re:
It’s viable in the minds of those who think we’ll be living under Nazi rule for at least 50 years.
But it’s just as rare to find anyone mentioning the costs of pointless separation. The point of mergers is to eliminate the redundant labor costs of that, even if nobody is willing to say so ahead of time.
The real problem is that no ordinary people seem to benefit from the overall reduction in human labor requirements. We should be happy when someone figures out a way for humans to do a thing with less effort. In the 1800s, it was common for people to work 80-90 hours a week. When that dropped to 40 (due to the “eight-hour day movement”), it didn’t make just the CEOs richer; everyone’s standard of living rose.
Somehow we seem to have forgotten about that and started fetishizing work for its own sake. There are economists seriously suggesting we drop down to like 20 hours a week or less, but it won’t work if all the saved money goes to Zaslav and friends.
What do CEOs and weather forecasters have in common? Both still get paid even if they are catastrophically wrong. The difference is that weather forecasters actually do their best to provide a valuable (if imperfect) service to the public. I have yet to meet a CEO who benefits the public just by doing their jobs.
Don’t worry about him, I am sure, after this hardship, he will land on his feet and go out there and try again…
Get rehired by some other company he can run into the group and get another golden parachute…
FFS, Karl, I’m with you on Zaslav’s incompetence, but when you describe a show moving from HBO to Netflix as “death” it is very hard to take you seriously.
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(a show that shouldn’t have been on fucking premium cable in the first fucking place, I might add)