Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav’s ‘Punishment’ For Disastrous Megamerger? $39 Million.
from the merge-ALL-the-things! dept
We’ve noted in detail how the AT&T/Time Warner/Discovery mergers have been an apocalyptic mess that aptly demonstrates the U.S. obsession with utterly pointless megadeals and a “growth for growth’s sake” mindset. Hundreds of billions of dollars later and the companies have produced a product that’s notably shittier than when they started, laying off thousands of people, cancelling popular brands, killing popular magazines, and leaving streaming catalogs with new, weird gaps due to a refusal to pay residuals.
Some of the company’s investors aren’t exactly thrilled with how things have been going. At a recent annual meeting, 49.2 percent of the company’s shareholders cast votes against the media giant’s executive compensation plan. But worry not! Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav still managed to walk away with a compensation package valued at $39.3 million:
Zaslav, who also holds the title of president, took home $39.3 million last year, after receiving a pay package in 2021 that soared to $246 million in 2021 thanks to a hefty $203 million stock options that was tacked on to his pay. Shareholders appear to be unhappy with the pricey package he’s receiving.
Usually, disproportionately massive executive compensation plans are approved a solid 97.7% of the time. One hopes Zaslav will be ok.
You’ll recall this entire mess started with AT&T’s disastrous $200 billion acquisitions of DirecTV and Time Warner, which resulted in upwards of 50,000 layoffs despite the company nabbing a $42 billion tax cut from the Trump administration. After incompetent AT&T executives failed at their bundled pivot to video advertising, they spun Time Warner off into its own entity.
Shortly thereafter Discovery acquired the remaining assets creating yet another company. Things haven’t gone well. The resulting giant’s often been too cheap to pay residuals, resulting in a lot of popular content getting pulled from its streaming services. More recently executives took heat for backing away from the HBO brand, about the only consistently popular part of the company’s assets.
The ill will that’s been generated among creators who’ve been fired or had projects scrapped is fairly legendary. It’s even prompted the U.S. government to briefly pretend it cares about competently reviewing the impact of giant mindless megadeals.
There’s also been the extremely unpopular rightward lurch of the company’s CNN cable news empire, something generally favored by cable and broadband industry mainstay John Malone. Malone, now on the Warner Bros. Discovery board, has spent an entire career cheering for mindless consolidation in media and telecom, then turning a blind eye to the resulting layoffs, quality issues, and resulting mess.
CNN’s obvious rightward lurch — falsely framed by CEO Chris Licht as a return to “dispassionate” and “centrist” news (it’s really not) — recently culminated in the company taking immense heat for holding a live rally for Donald Trump “moderated” and barely fact checked by a former Daily Caller alum. The quest for a brief boost in ratings easily trumped any worries about a stable Democracy.
All told, it’s not particularly hard to see how hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of layoffs later, the end product is decidedly worse than when this whole mess started back in 2017. Ultimately, the point of these deals winds up being tax breaks, massive executive compensation packages, and a rotating crop of incompetent MBAs who falsely get to put “savvy dealmaker” on their resumes.
Again, mindless media consolidation is consistently harmful. It results in unhealthy markets, endless layoffs, a reduction in diversity and quality in cable news, less competition, and a mindless race to the bottom. Yet the need for competent media regulation and antitrust reform is somehow always a distant afterthought, deemed irrelevant by the seme gentlemen who stand to benefit from our apathy.
Filed Under: david zaslav, growth for growth's sake, licht, media consolidation, megadeals, mergers, trump town hall
Companies: warner bros. discovery
