from the fail-upward-trust-fund-brunchlords dept
You may recall how the Warner Brothers Discovery merger promised everybody superb new synergies for the media sector. As a substitute it wound up being an enormous sloppy turd of a deal leading to countless layoffs, the shuttering of quite a few standard media manufacturers, the cancellation of an extended line of standard programming, larger client costs, and decrease product high quality from HBO to CNN.
The person in control of this scorching mess, CEO David Zaslav, has steadily been rewarded for his incompetence with gigantic, ever-escalating pay packages that by no means replicate his lack of real-world competence.
Warner Bros. Discovery misplaced $11.5 billion final 12 months. The corporate is within the means of firing one other spherical of staff for its executives errors. Its streaming service more and more consists of actuality TV slop and C-tier content material. The merger was so pointless, and conventional cable TV channels are so nugatory, Time Warner and Discovery are planning to unwind the disastrous partnership:
“Warner Bros. Discovery, the movie and TV colossus behind HBO and CNN, introduced on Monday that it might cleave itself into two corporations, separating its cable networks and streaming companies.”
The NYT protection of the cut up solely faintly hints at Zaslav’s incompetence, and doesn’t even point out the phrase “layoffs” regardless of one other spherical hitting solely simply final week.
They’re at the moment squabbling over methods to cut up the debt between the 2 “new” corporations, created predominately by the pointless merger. On the identical time, Zaslav is poised to get an enormous $52 million pay package deal, comprised of a money bonus of $23.9 million and $23.1 million in performance-based restricted inventory grants. Zaslav will proceed to steer the corporate’s most necessary belongings: its streaming enterprise and film studios.
Firm buyers are more and more elevating eyebrows at Zaslav’s pay package deal, lately issuing a symbolic vote towards Zaslav’s outsized compensation. Zaslav will receives a commission anyway, however the CEO is seeing elevated criticism, even in media commerce magazines like Selection that are inclined to tender promote government incompetence, labor abuses, and outsized government compensation for concern of shedding entry.
A significant justification by the Warner Bros. Discovery board for Zaslav’s pay package deal was the financial savings Zaslav created by senseless consolidation and layoffs, Selection notes:
“A kind of targets for Zaslav was to “Full integration pipeline; Implement value controls to regulate value to serve in declining linear [TV] income atmosphere.” On this entrance, Zaslav “Achieved incremental value financial savings of $1.8B in 2024, considerably overdelivering towards inside objective,” in accordance with the WBD compensation committee. (These financial savings have been achieved partly by main layoffs.) The committee decided Zaslav had met the outlined strategic targets at 115% of his goal.”
However executives like Zaslav are purely extractive animals. They briefly goose inventory valuations and generate tax breaks by cannibalizing their very own manufacturers by pointless consolidation that will save a bit of cash by cuts, layoffs, and illusory “synergies,” however very clearly hurt the general survivability of the model and long term high quality.
Zaslav has made it very clear that he sees extra media consolidation coming below Trumpism, which is able to rubber stamp your problematic mergers supplied you show to the king that you just’re suitably racist and promise that your reporters gained’t have interaction in any critical journalism crucial of the regime.
Meaning extra value hikes and unhealthy choices are proper over the horizon as the corporate pursues unimaginable progress by bottomless value hikes, much more layoffs, and additional high quality erosion. Distorted monetary motivations made attainable by monetary shell video games guarantee no person learns from expertise or faces accountability for choices dangerous to staff, workers, or the model.
Filed Below: consolidation, david zaslav, government compensation, journalism, media, mergers
Firms: warner bros. discovery
