Discovery CEO Zaslav Gets A Big Fat Raise Despite Being Terrible At His Job
By now we’ve well established that this particular series of media mergers — which began with AT&T’s doomed acquisition of Time Warner and ended with Time Warner’s subsequent spin off and fusion with Discovery — were some of the dumbest, most pointless “business” exercises ever conceived by man.
The pointless saga burned through hundreds of billions in debt, saw more than 50,000 people lose their jobs, killed off numerous popular brands (like Mad Magazine and HBO), created oceans of animosity among creatives, and resulted in a Max streaming service that’s arguably dumber and of notably lower quality than when the entire expensive gambit began.
And of course, the executives responsible — like Discovery CEO David Zaslav — were punished last year by… receiving a big fat raise:
“David Zaslav, CEO of troubled Warner Bros. Discovery, got a 27% increase in total compensation for 2023.
According to the company’s proxy statement, Zaslav was paid $49.7 million, including $3 million in salary, $23.1 million in stock awards and $22 million in non-equity incentive plans compensation. He received $39.3 million in 2022.”
That’s still lower that previous years’ compensation. Zaslav made a whopping $246 million in 2021 thanks to a hefty $203 million in stock options tacked on to his pay. It’s highly representative of the modern U.S. media sector, where the least competent brunchlords fail upward into positions of power, struggle repeatedly at any sort of competency, then get rewarded for it.
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, and things just kept getting worse. 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.
Most of these decisions may gain short-term tax breaks, stock boosts, or “I’m a savvy dealmaker” participation trophies on executive resumes, but they’ve generally been terrible for debt loads, customer satisfaction, employee happiness, and the longer-term health of the brands.
Kind of amusingly, trade magazines like Broadcasting and Cable don’t think it’s worth noting any of the chaos, product quality issues, or layoffs in their announcement of the news. Neither does The Hollywood Reporter. And Deadline found time to mention that Zaslav is the “poster child of high executive compensation,” but didn’t think any of the Zaslav’s failings were relevant to their story.
It’s nice work if you can get it.