Yes, David Zaslav made a boatload of money selling Warner Bros. Discovery to Paramount Skydance – a payout worth more than $800 million that shareholders begrudged him earlier this month in the form of a non-binding vote against it.
What’s less talked about is how he also spread the wealth. Specifically, the media mogul known as “Zas” brought an ownership culture to the owner of Warner Bros., HBO and CNN when he took over in 2022, with nearly half his 35,000 employees receiving stock awards as part of their compensation.
That stock has appreciated from a low of around $7 a share to the final sale price of $31 a share – equal to nearly $80 billion excluding debt. That means employees, about 16,000 of them, are sitting on one of the best stock trades in the media business in recent years.
“People are putting their kids through private school because they hold the stock,” one associate told me in an interview. “They’re buying homes. This is how the system is supposed to work.”
WBD sales to Paramount Skydance won’t close until regulatory reviews are complete; press reps for the company say they don’t have granular details on the average amount of stock given out and the average appreciation. But my sources there provided me with some interesting anecdotal evidence on the upside of Zas’s ownership culture–particularly after his bidding war for the company ended.
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One person is ad sales was awarded $100,000 in stock, which appreciated to around $600,000; a corporate events planner who received $220,000 in stock, is now sitting on a nest egg worth more than $1 million; ditto for someone in WBD’s sports-production team.
As I previously reported, the most overlooked part of the annual letter from BlackRock CEO Larry Fink may have been his call to expand what’s known as the “ownership culture” to Middle America.
People worried about losing their jobs to outside forces like AI can benefit from technological advances by investing in it, according to Fink. That’s easier than ever given the proliferation of various exchange-traded funds, mutual funds and even fractional shares of stock.
Zas’s ownership culture plan came from his many years at NBCU, when it was owned by General Electric and run by the legendary CEO Jack Welch. Zas counts Welch, who died in 2020, as one of his corporate mentors (along with cable pioneer John Malone).
Welch was one of the first CEOs to promote stock ownership widely inside GE’s workforce, aligning employee and shareholder interests. It paid off when GE became one of the market’s hottest stocks.
Zas became CEO of WBD after running Discovery Inc., where Malone was a major shareholder and helped engineer the deal to combine his company with Warner Media, which was flailing under the ownership of AT&T.
He had his work cut out for him: Zas needed to cull mountains of debt; repair a middling streaming service and a studio while cutting costs.
He also needed to instill an ownership culture in the workforce, particularly at Warner Bros., a company that had been changing hands seemingly every few years, even if the market didn’t cooperate.
For years, shares of WBD hovered between $6 and $8; Wall Street short sellers – professional traders who make money betting a stock will fall – pounced. Zas, however, believed in his strategy so much that he took most of his pay in stock options, meaning if shares improved he would participate in the upside.
So did many employees. By 2025, as they received shares in the form of compensation, Zas’s vision for the company began to take shape. He was slashing debt to manageable levels; Warner Bros. began churning out hits at the box office; he fixed his streaming service, finally naming it HBO Max. It became the third largest behind Netflix and Amazon Prime.
WBD also became takeover bait. First David Ellison, backed by the deep pockets of his father, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, came calling, bidding $19 cash and stock for WBD. In response, Zas, as first reported on these pages, staged a bidding war. He eventually pitted streaming giant Netflix against the Ellisons, pushing the final sales price to $31 a share – all in cash.
Zas is getting a lot of ink over his big payday, and a degree of grief from the usual class-warfare suspects for making so much money from the sale of the company. What that narrative leaves out is that he did take a chance on himself by taking most of his compensation in options.
“When he got here, WBD gave stock out as compensation only at the senior levels,” one associate adds. “He wanted to create an ownership culture so he spread stock out through the company.”
Jack Welch would be proud.
