Warner Bros CEO David Zaslav’s $550 Million Golden Parachute Sees ‘Symbolic’ Investor Rebuke

from the symbolically-useful dept

We’ve noted how Warner Brothers CEO David Zaslav is poised to receive a $550 million golden parachute from the sale of Warner Brothers to Paramount, despite the fact that his tenure has been broadly viewed as disastrous at best.

Zaslav oversaw years of dysfunction during the last wave of pointless Warner Brothers mergers, which included tens of 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.

Warner Brothers investors this week voted to finalize the merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers anyway. Though a majority of investors also voted against giving Zaslav his comically outsized compensation package. That said, the vote is considered largely “symbolic,” and isn’t likely to stop Zaslav from walking away with a massive chunk of money for being incompetent:

“It’s a purely symbolic rebuke: The shareholder advisory vote is non-binding, meaning the Warner Bros. Discovery board can go ahead with the payouts as planned anyway. But it shows WBD shareholders aren’t happy by the generous payments to the company’s outgoing executive team and comes after shareholders last year also voted against the WBD executive compensation packages.”

It’s nice that investors took the time to realize these outsized compensation packages not only harm the company’s bottom line, but they reward incompetent leadership. But at the same time they approved a merger that, largely thanks to the whopping $111 billion in debt, is inevitably going to result in yet more layoffs, price hikes, customer defections, and overall chaos.

Investors turn a blind eye because they like the temporary stock bumps and tax breaks generated from pointless consolidation, but you’d think that the fact that every single Warner Brothers mega-transaction to date has been a giant disaster would be more foreword in their thinking.

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 infighting, a decline in quality journalism at places like CNN (and now CBS), 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.

Filed Under: ceo, consolidation, david zaslav, executive compensation, journalism, mergers

Companies: paramount, warner bros. discovery