Is David Zaslav happier about the 11 Oscars that Warner Bros. won this week, or the $800 million payout he stands to make in the sale of its parent company? Shrewd Hollywood insiders think they know the answer, but the fact is that Zaslav should be congratulated for both and a lot else.
During Sunday night’s stunning Oscars sweep, insiders tell On The Money that the mercurial CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery was barraging friends with jubilant text messages as the victories piled up, including Best Picture for “One Battle After Another” and Michael B. Jordan’s win for Best Actor in “Sinners.”
The crucial context here is that Zaslav – a veteran dealmaker who was mentored by Jack Welch at GE as well as cable TV magnate John Malone – had long been written off in Tinseltown as a bean counter who simply didn’t get the movie business.
Suffice it to say those days are over, and however grudgingly, the creative types can’t help but acknowledge what Zaslav has accomplished at WBD in less than four years.
Not long after AT&T offloaded its Warner Media subsidiary to Discovery in April 2022 – the deal that made Zaslav CEO of both businesses – WBD looked like it risked becoming a penny stock, with a $5 handle and a mountain of debt. The merger had been arranged by Malone and Zaslav and for the next three years or so, most investors wished it had never happened.
By early 2025, however, Wall Street began to appreciate Zaslav’s slashing of billions off his balance sheet as he made unpopular decisions like canceling “Batgirl” – a movie with no real mainstream audience. It helped that by mid summer, HBO Max, his streaming service, finally settled on a name with HBO in it and became the third-largest streamer. It also helped that last summer Warner Bros. began churning out hits.
By August of last year, shares of WBD were up to around $12 – up more than 50% from the previous 12 months. That was a full month before the bidding war for his company began – sending its stock on a six-month tear that boosted its price nearly 160%.
WBD’s stock went into overdrive after David Ellison – the Hollywood producer who had just scooped up Paramount with the help of his dad Larry Ellison, the Oracle co-founder – came calling. But Zas, as he is known in the C-suite, didn’t welcome the offer and instead launched a bidding war, as On The Money first reported.
The drama eventually pitted streaming giant Netflix against Ellison’s Paramount Skydance, but when it was first reported by On The Money that Zas was looking for a final price at $30 a share, lots of laughter was heard – not only in deal rooms, but also on Wall Street trading desks betting on the outcome.
As you know if you’re a regular reader, Paramount Skydance won the duel with a final price of $31 a share, or $80.6 billion – for a stock that had been languishing near penny levels.
Lots will be written by media types that Zas isn’t worth the all-in $800 million he could receive in stocks, options, tax benefits and other payments if this deal closes, as expected by the third quarter of this year. But I don’t hear the caterwauling from investors, nor from his fellow CEOs.
Zas, I am told, made a recent appearance at the book party of former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein at the Crane Club in NYC, attended by the likes of current Goldman boss David Solomon, Henry Kravis of KKR fame and Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman.
Blankfein’s highly readable memoir “Streetwise” (which On The Money is combing through now) was front and center, but Zaslav’s negotiation skills were also a major source of chatter and celebration at an event attended by some of the best dealmakers in the business, my sources say.
