Discovery CEO Zaslav Gets A Big Fat Raise Despite Being Terrible At His Job
from the fail-upward-to-the-level-of-your-incompetence dept
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.
Filed Under: brunchlords, david zalsav, excessive executive compensation, journalism, layoffs, media, mergers
Companies: warner bros. discovery
Comments on “Discovery CEO Zaslav Gets A Big Fat Raise Despite Being Terrible At His Job”
It’s times like this that I recall a few choice quotes from Nick Hanauer’s article, The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats:
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Yep, doesn’t make sense that someone (many) are earning 1’000 or even 1’000’000 times more than me when not having much more meals than me.
But logic is logic, and business is business.
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“For business is business, and business must grow, regardless of crummies in tummies you know.”
–The Lorax
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“Today we have trickle-down economics. What nonsense this is. Am I really such a superior person? Do I belong at the center of the moral as well as economic universe?”
They really do believe this, even the ones who don’t. Because the alternative would be to accept reality, that not everyone can live the dream. For there to be a rich class, there has to be a poorer worker class doing all the crappy maintenance and logistics jobs that the wealthy wouldn’t be seen doing. The truth is that there isn’t a space for everybody to be at the rich person’s table.
So the narrative has to be turned into an issue of morality. There has to be a narrative of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, that there exists for everyone a threshold of work and effort that you can put in, after which the world will surely be yours if you just keep working, working, working. Never mind that vacancies are limited and competition is fierce, this is the only system that works! Because to believe otherwise would be to realize that you, in fact, don’t control most of the outcome. It would be to realize that success heavily depends on luck. But you can’t tell people that, because then people stop trying. Investing becomes speculating. So you have to keep selling this idea that failure is immoral. CEOs get their golden umbrellas because they deserve it, and you’ll have to work a lifetime before you even come close to being in their shadow.
The trouble with that is that kids nowadays have actually done the one thing that the CEOs are terrified of: they’ve given up.
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So there’s been this MSNBC interview making the rounds on the Internet from Scott Galloway, talking about his new book “Algebra on Wealth”, which is basically him pointing out what Gen Zs and millennials have long since realized: that there’s just no point in trying.
I’ve been personally looking at it through the lens of an MMORPG. Consider World or Warcraft, or any other highly developed and mature game ecosystem like Magic the Gathering. Why would anyone want to dive in now, when not only is the cost to entry just to survive is so high, but you can expect to be ganged on by more experienced and resource-abundant players whose main advantage is that they got a head start years ago? And if people won’t do this for virtual and game worlds, why would they do it for the real world?
It’s worth asking boomers and business owners. Would you knowingly take a huge risk now? Would you start over again with nothing in this economy, without any of the support systems built up after decades? If you wouldn’t, then why would you demand the same of young people?
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You hit the nail on the head with the MMORPG analogy, I think. In any established ecosystem, you’re always going to be fighting with the early adopters, the people who were there first. And that’s the problem young people are facing now: going against the generation who was there first, making a conscious decision to screw them over to enrich the super wealthy.
For what it’s worth, I took a look at Galloway’s Algebra of Wealth. I wish it was really more than just an old guy saying “step out of your comfort zone”, but that’s about all there is to it. In his defense I don’t see how you can really say much else in this day and age. But it’s not particularly helpful for a new generation struggling to meet life milestones, especially when they can’t afford to take risks that don’t pay off. Why would they, when even the hyper wealthy who have the most resources to burn wouldn’t take those risks?
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What’s worse, those outrageously high wages are paid for utterly incompetent people like this Discovery case. Like Musk with Twitter (although his money came from labor exploitation in African mines promoted by his dad).
Two abysmally dumb morons that took well known, established brands and shoved into their arses replacing for generic, dumb shit along with destroying what they were supposed to manage. Twitter even had entries in the goddamn Oxford dictionary.
Makes this several orders of magnitude more outrageous.
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What’s scary is the fact that this was written 10 years ago, and dated before the Trump presidency.
Now the pitchforks are coming… just not for the reasons that Nick expected. I wonder how many of those disaffected young people will end up voting Trump just to spite Biden? Because that obviously worked out for them the first time…
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The funniest shit is that Trump isn’t even subtle about it. He’s openly gloated and celebrated college protesters getting moved off their campsites. He’s made it very clear that given the opportunity, he will fuck them over with no regrets or restraint whatsoever.
If these students still think that Trump’s a preferable option over Biden at this point, it’s safe to say that there is no helping them.
When tomorrow is always someone else's problem...
In a system that places value solely on how much money you’re making today doing whatever it takes to ensure that you’ll always be making more today than you made yesterday, with tomorrow brushed aside as not worth considering sadly it makes perfect sense to reward those at the top for burning a companies’ future to the ground so long as it makes things better for the execs in the short term.
After all, once one company crashes and has been looted until there’s nothing left for those running it there’s always more to jump to for an ‘executive experienced in the field of business and/or management’…
There’s no valid excuse for that level of compensation. There is literally NOTHING anyone could possibly achieve that would justify it. If this clown had any level of empathy, we’d be reading about his MASSIVE charitable donations. I suspect there are NONE.
At least pro athletes work hard to maintain their elite physicality. CEOs are PARASITES. Their only actual work is in deceiving those foolish enough to employ them.
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and signing my paycheck lol
Zaslav and the entire board of directors belong in prison for stealing from the shareholders.
No. There are accounting and payroll and etc departments that do that work. The CEO is the most infinitely replaceable part of any business. If they all got John Gault raptured tomorrow, nothing would happen, except an entirely new set of stuffed shirts would get set atop the upsidedown funnel that is our economic system.
I don’t think that really fits with the other negative points. Employing useless people costs customers money, in theory, in addition to being bad for the company and its shareholders. So the question should be asked: were these people mostly useless, or was this gutting important parts of the company? And I don’t see any real information about that in the linked story.
As W.B. Discovery has a huge number of holdings in dying businesses, such as television networks, I’m sure some of those lay-offs were justified.
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Inflated profit margins cost consumers money, employment doesn’t.
Good ol C Suite nepotism! I look forward to the trickle down of value!
Everyone knows what is going on here.
Board of Directors and CEOs hire friends and family and get to choose their own pay.
Who wouldn’t choose to pay themselves more if they had a choice?
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Don’t forget that most shares of most stocks are owned by massive hedge funds run by buddies of these CEOs. So when there’s a “shareholder vote,” the votes being counted are generally the votes of the very wealthy.
Every system related to corporate finance and ownership is designed to make the wealthy more wealthy. The success of the company is secondary, and the well-being of the proletariat, the country, or the world isn’t even on the agenda.
Zaslav is going to hang on until the next republican presidency then WBD will end up part of yet another megamerger that shouldn’t be approved, which will lead to an even bigger, debt laden entity selling the floorboards from beneath them to pay interest despite the company and it’s vast library and IP being a license to print money.
It would seem that more and more people are waking up to this kind of fuckery promoted by the rich. Too late and way too few yet to make any difference. The Communism boogeyman used to scare people from developing this type of critical thinking was way too successful.
The current capitalism crisis won’t be solved by pushing a few million through the poverty meat mower because there’s another underlying crisis produced by capitalism in full development and that cannot be solved by traditional propaganda and repression means: the environmental crisis.
We are in for a rough ride.