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In a classic early episode of The Simpsons, Homer saves the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant by resorting to a game of “eenie meenie miny mo,” while obviously having no idea what he is actually doing at his job. He is hailed as a hero even though he knows deep down that he was the beneficiary of dumb luck. After he does it again at the neighboring Shelbyville plant during another meltdown, the truth is revealed. Homer is immortalized by everyone from Magic Johnson to Barney Gumble with the phrase to “pull a Homer,” defined as “to succeed despite idiocy.”
In the media world, we now have an entry that belongs right beside it – “pull a Zaslav.”
For years, David Zaslav has been persona non grata among American media execs for his embattled stewardship over Warner Bros. Discovery. But after WBD’s sale to Paramount for $110 billion, Zaslav is being hailed as a genius. The New York Times applauded Zaslav with the headline, “How David Zaslav Pulled Off the Deal of a Lifetime.” The New York Post praised him as a winner for dangling the company in front of Netflix and Paramount for a bidding war and “pulling off the defining media deal of his generation.” So did the Hollywood Reporter, who mentioned the hundreds of millions of dollars that he stands to make personally from the sale (and the billions of dollars in cuts that will come to the newly merged entity).
But was the Paramount sale a true stroke of genius from David Zaslav, or did he just merely continue to fail upwards in the greatest and most fitting success story in the history of modern American media?
David Zaslav’s tenure as CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, formed in 2022 after the merger of Discovery Inc. and the spin-off of WarnerMedia, was marked by a series of questionable moves, negative headlines, and unabashed failures.
Where to even begin? There were multiple waves of layoffs. Entire movies scrapped as tax write-offs. The disastrous appointment of Chris Licht as the CEO of CNN caused the cable news giant to suffer a complete inner meltdown. The loss of a cornerstone relationship with the NBA on TNT, which he took the brunt of responsibility for personally after dissing the league and seeing the network’s relationship with Adam Silver and the league completely fall apart. The bizarre rebranding of HBO Max to Max, then back to HBO Max again. And although it might be easy to forget now, Zaslav and WBD were involved in the failed launch of the joint streamer Venu Sports along with ESPN and Fox.
Nowhere has Zaslav’s leadership been more under fire than in the world of sports. It’s been clear for years that sports were at the bottom of Warner Bros. Discovery’s CEO priorities. He insisted that his company didn’t need the NBA and was happy to see them go after trying to wage a legal battle that was destined to fail in court to keep the league. The company then moved to add a hodgepodge of sports rights, including French Open tennis, Big 12 action, and sublicensed College Football Playoff games that routinely have to go up against the NFL.
But through all the turmoil and losses, Zaslav shrank the company to the point where it became attractive enough to a buyer, at least part of it. The idea of spinning off the cable networks just a few years after merging them into WarnerMedia was like taking one step back to take two steps forward. But it was also proof that all of Zaslav’s stumbles somehow kept succeeding. A deal became attractive to Netflix, which, by all accounts, had the strongest plan to acquire the streaming and studio business.
Then came the Ellisons and Paramount.
Not content to pump the brakes after a massive purchase of UFC rights and a hostile takeover of CBS News, the Ellison family set their sights on WBD. And they simply would not take no for an answer. Despite being told by the Warner Bros. Discovery board that its plan to purchase the entire company ranked second behind Netflix, Paramount kept pushing forward with its quest to build a true media empire. They were willing to take on not just the streaming and studios business, but the declining cable networks, and the debt required to afford $31 per share for all of it, triple what WBD’s stock was just a year ago. Were the Ellison family not looking to build a media company that could rule the world in news, politics, sports, movies, and streaming, where would WBD really be right now?
While Larry and David Ellison attempt to consolidate as much media as they can (with the Trump administration’s regulatory blessing), Zaslav must have felt like he had won the lottery. And that’s not being clever or trying to use a metaphorical turn of phrase. It’s quite literal.
On Tuesday, Zaslav placed a filing to sell $114 million worth of Warner Bros. Discovery stock. By the time the sale is complete, he will become a billionaire. This is the same David Zaslav who just last June saw his own shareholders reject his massive $51.9 million salary in a ceremonial vote of no confidence.
If you want to be generous, you can commend the CEO for his determination in bringing WBD to the place where it became a sellable asset. In other words, he made many cuts to bring the company to some semblance of financial sustainability. But the cuts always seemed more hatchet job than surgical precision. It’s hard to fathom that Zaslav’s master plan was to make movies only to scrap them, tell the NBA to take a hike, and then sue to get them back, and whatever the company has tried to do to make CNN relevant.
Even the original idea to sell the studios to Netflix was hijacked by the endless wealth of the Ellisons, who gave David Zaslav and company a fortune that they probably could not believe in their wildest dreams.
As the sun sets on Warner Bros. Discovery, David Zaslav will laugh all the way to the bank. But that won’t be any solace for the many tears shed at the company along the way.
About Matt Yoder