from the fail-upward-trust-fund-brunchlords dept
You may recall how the Warner Brothers Discovery merger promised everybody wonderful new synergies for the media sector. As a substitute it wound up being a giant sloppy turd of a deal leading to infinite layoffs, the shuttering of quite a few in style media manufacturers, the cancellation of a protracted line of in style programming, increased client costs, and decrease product high quality from HBO to CNN.
The person answerable for 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 lost $11.5 billion last year. The corporate is in the process of firing another round of workers 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 will cleave itself into two firms, 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 another round hitting only just last week.
They’re at present squabbling over the right way to cut up the debt between the 2 “new” firms, created predominately by the pointless merger. On the similar time, Zaslav is poised to get a large $52 million pay bundle, 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 traders are more and more elevating eyebrows at Zaslav’s pay bundle, recently issuing a symbolic vote against 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 likely to gentle promote government incompetence, labor abuses, and outsized government compensation for worry of dropping entry.
A significant justification by the Warner Bros. Discovery board for Zaslav’s pay bundle was the financial savings Zaslav created via senseless consolidation and layoffs, Variety notes:
“A kind of objectives for Zaslav was to “Full integration pipeline; Implement price controls to regulate price to serve in declining linear [TV] income setting.” On this entrance, Zaslav “Achieved incremental price financial savings of $1.8B in 2024, considerably overdelivering in opposition to inner purpose,” in line with the WBD compensation committee. (These financial savings had been achieved partly via major layoffs.) The committee decided Zaslav had met the outlined strategic objectives 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 via pointless consolidation that will save a bit of cash via cuts, layoffs, and illusory “synergies,” however very clearly hurt the general survivability of the model and long run high quality.
Zaslav has made it very clear that he sees more media consolidation coming under Trumpism, which can rubber stamp your problematic mergers offered you demonstrate to the king that you’re suitably racist and promise that your reporters won’t engage in any serious journalism critical of the regime.
Meaning extra worth hikes and dangerous selections are proper over the horizon as the corporate pursues unattainable development via bottomless worth hikes, much more layoffs, and additional high quality erosion. Distorted monetary motivations made potential by monetary shell video games guarantee no one learns from expertise or faces accountability for selections dangerous to employees, staff, or the model.
Filed Underneath: consolidation, david zaslav, executive compensation, journalism, media, mergers
Corporations: warner bros. discovery
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