David Zaslav just pulled off one of the greatest media mergers of the century — but that doesn’t mean he’s done wheeling and dealing.
The wily CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery has sold the media giant for $72 billion — more than doubling its value in a matter of months. He may get even more, depending on whom you talk to, capping one of the more momentous executive comeback stories in recent years.
Before we get into why the cake isn’t quite baked on WBD’s future, let’s consider what just went down with Zaslav’s mosh-pit-style bidding war, how he set some of the biggest media moguls against each other, ramping up the sale price of his company to levels no one thought possible.
When all this began in September, WBD’s stock was in the toilet, trading at around $12 a share, just above its one-year low of $7.50. That’s when Paramount Skydance saw value where no one did, except maybe Zaslav; they offered $23.50 — or around $56 billion — for all of WBD, its studio, the HBO Max streaming service, as well as cable channels CNN, HBO and Discovery.
It was thought to be a done deal. Paramount Skydance’s deep-pocketed owners, David and Larry Ellison, promised WBD shareholders all cash for an asset that was teetering, and a regulatory glide path through the Trump administration given the elder Ellison’s close friendship with President Trump.
Not quite. Zaslav is a protégé of two of the best CEOs in recent history, Jack Welch and cable pioneer John Malone. That put him in line to become CEO of newly created Warner Bros. Discovery, a deal engineered by Malone, formed after the AT&T spinoff of Warner Media in 2022.
Money-losing assets
Warner’s assets included a major studio that lost money, an unprofitable streaming service, and old media cable channels like HBO, CNN, TNT and the Food Network. Zaslav was saddled with billions in debt. He took heat cratering shareholder value while paying himself millions.
What the market and media naysayers didn’t appreciate is that he was scaling down a bloated operation and improving the Warner studio — it became the first to surpass $4 billion in revenues in 2025. He was also building up his streaming service, finally settling on a name, HBO Max, which is now the industry’s third largest.
To his credit, David Ellison saw that potential early on — even as he was in the throes of trying to buy Paramount from the initially reluctant Redstone family, and then maneuvering through the odd maze of the Trump administration’s regulatory apparatus.
He saw that he could combine CBS with CNN, bail out Paramount’s feeble streaming network with HBO Max, and supplement Paramount’s studio with Warner’s, gaining tons of intellectual property with some of the most iconic programming in recent history, such as “The Sopranos,” “Harry Potter” and “Game of Thrones.”
Nearly the moment David and Larry swooped in with an initial offer for all of WBD three months ago, the larger bidding war was on. As the Post first reported, Zas began pitching a sale of some or all of the company to Amazon, Apple and others. In the end, he settled on a bidding contest among Comcast, Paramount Skydance and Netflix. Zas, as he’s known in media and Wall Street circles, set his price target at $30 a share and deal participants scoffed: Who would pay $30 a share for something that traded at around $7 just a few months ago?
Misplaced confidence
The Ellisons appeared particularly confident they could underbid since the Trump administration, as we reported, wanted WBD in the Ellisons’ hands. Trump and Larry Ellison are friends, Larry being a long time MAGA supporter. Plus the deal seemed the cleanest of all the bidders without much overlap to present antitrust worries.
Trump was also said to like the idea of the Ellisons controlling CNN, which he considers anti-MAGA. DOJ Antitrust sent out word it didn’t like all those streaming customers — Netflix’s 300 million plus another 100 million of HBO Max — in one company.
But the bids kept growing. Netflix’s Ted Sarandos was sold on Zaslav’s pitch to supplement his streaming empire with a top-flight studio that can produce namebrand, home-grown content. Now lusting for a deal, Sarandos met with Trump and developed a friendship he and Zaslav believe will mollify the regulatory hurdles. Comcast kept bidding up as well as its chief, Brian Roberts — despite his fraught relationship with Trump for owning the MAGA-hating MS NOW — tried to smooth things over with big gifts to build the new White House ballroom.
The Ellisons recently came in at $30 a share; Netflix sealed the deal at $30.75.
The Ellisons hate losing and are planning a counterattack; they might bid even more or go hostile, arguing their all-cash offer is higher than Netfix’s cash and stock even if its total price beats theirs by 75 cents.
How’s that for creating shareholder value?
