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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
Comments on “Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav’s ‘Punishment’ For Disastrous Megamerger? $39 Million.”
So after Zaslav failed to make WB/D perform better, he got a bigger paycheck? You know, I’m reminded of how in Japan, CEOs who don’t perform to expectations receive pay cuts (Say what you want about Nintendo (and I have even boycotted them due to the stories I hear about in BestNetTech), but if they underperform, their CEOs receive pay cuts instead of pay increases). Yet here in “the greatest country on earth” CEOs get paid more for doing a worse job.
Is there any wonder the writers are on strike?
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It’s all relative. It’s smaller than he would have received had they done well, so in CEO and MBA thinking, he’s been appropriately penalized.
Would that the stock price collapses just as he tries to exercise the options.
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On the other hand, considering how Japan was the country to invent karoshi in the 1980s, I’m not certain that CEOs getting a bigger punishment is necessarily a better tradeoff.
Culturally, Japan might be the country to actually punish their CEOs, but factoring in that their society is built on a foundation of shaming yourself and martyring yourself for the sake of the organization’s function and reputation…
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I fail to see the downside…
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The downside is that unless corroborated independently, it’s all fucking theater.
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Fair point, and fair enough. Basically, just fair all around.
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The downside is that many of the rank and file workers are culturally expected and obligated to throw themselves under the bus before it gets to the point where the CEO gets fined.
Japan does not have a habit of prioritizing individual welfare. The image and reputation of the company, and by extension the CEO, comes first, which means absolving them of all blame or responsibility. It’s not unlike the end of Superman The Animated Series where Darkseid’s people, despite being little more than poorly treated slaves, will still throw themselves at the feet of their leader.
A CEO is many things, but in a Japanese corporation, he is a god. It takes a fucking lot of bodies to get to the point where they get fined.
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Guaranteed To Only Go Up
In the past, a lot of screwball ideas for corporate growth didn’t result in massive losses. Often, if there was a misstep, the company would get bought out by a rival. But they didn’t necessarily lose a ton of money, and they would usually break even. It’s a lesson that modern stockholders have yet to learn, and probably will not learn unless there’s a massive stock market downturn.
” 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.”
One might begin to think these uber riche captains of industry are not very smart. These same people also contribute large sums toward loser candidates thus screwing the entire country.
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You misunderstand. They aren’t optimizing for The Social Good. They aren’t optimizing for The Company’s Good. They’re optimizing for their exit package.
How do you think they became uber riche captains of industry?
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” They’re optimizing for their exit package”
Their exit may occur prematurely due to a lack of planning, mother nature is exiting many species including humans. Denial does nothing to stop it.
Rounding error
Headline:
Article:
When the rounding error of $300,000 is four times the median household income in the United States, that’s a tip-off that we’ve got a problem.
Musk is there to prove that some of Wall Street CEOs reputation is just collective masturbation and overall sexual tension with anything that might boost short term gains, long term survival of the companies be damned.
Also, logic be damned when you get to the higher echelon. If any peon fails that hard costing the companies a few billions he/she will be fired never to find a job in the industry ever again. And probably prosecuted. These “demigods” get millions in bonuses. There’s no punishment for being awful if you are rich enough.
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“There’s no punishment for being awful if you are rich enough.”
Yes there is … Matthew 19:24
Oh, no, you’re right. As you were then.
I’m straining as hard as I possibly can to cry titanium tears of sorrow for him.
#pleasegofunddavidzNOW
Offering to do a full year of bad work for a mere $250k. Any takers? I’ll merely suck, i won’t destroy your business or house or anything at all.
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Try the RIAA. They’ve been trying to destroy piracy for decades while collecting protection money from artists, and in that time they’ve managed to achieve jack shit and fuck all.
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Good point. What saved the recording industry was not stronger anti-piracy laws but the switch of people’s listening habits from downloads to streaming.
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While simultaneously fucking the artist over.
the disaster happened under AT&T
To recap: AT&T mismanaged Warners so badly that they needed to find some sucker to toss their mess at and run away fast. The Shark Week guy might have been the only one who raised his hand, so he got the mess. He probably knew it was a mess (why would AT&T sell otherwise) but even he’d said he was surprised at how bad a mess it was when he got a look at it.
So now he’s in the painful process of cleaning up the mess and you know what, I’m willing to wait and see if he can do it. He hasn’t had enough time to show results. Stuff like cancelling Batgirl and changing the name to Max to avoid more destruction of the HBO brand could turn out to be right decisions.
What happens to CNN remains to be seen. I’ve already written off cable, it’s going to die with its geriatric audience, and wondering whether news will make the transition to streaming at all. Look at Amazon, Apple, Disney, Netflix, Paramount: nobody cares about news. If Zaslav wants to experiment with news on Max, he may uncover unmet demand.
ugly, greedy, revolting modern day Hollywood slob zasshole is. How dares ha has the same first name as me 😡 🔪🔫
Hollywood nowadays is completely out of touch with the entire planet, and even the studios themselves are not even being run by artist, creative, or entertainment executives, the whole industry is now just being run by insurance executives, and unprofessional elites. I might as well be glad that there’s another WGA strike going on.