Warner Bros. Discovery chief David Zaslav largely evaded questions about NBA talks and Paramount Global‘s potential as a WBD merger partner, but he did weigh in on the hot topic of executive pay.
“All CEOs need to be paid with alignment with shareholders,” he declared. In 2023, a year when his company’s stock price hovered around $10 a share, less than half of its value when it began trading in 2022, Zaslav collected a total payday of $49.7 million, up more than $10 million from the prior year.
The comments came during a Milken Conference panel titled “The Corporate Compass: Charting the Role of the CEO.” Zaslav appeared alongside three other chief executives: EY’s Carmine Di Sibio, Time magazine’s Jessica Sibley and FedEx’s Raj Subramaniam.
Throughout his nearly two decades in the corner office, Zaslav has often become enmeshed in controversy over executive compensation. In 2021, the year when he spearheaded the $43 billion merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery, Zaslav received $247 million, of which $203 million came in the form of option awards.
“The majority of compensation should be aligned with the performance of the stock,” the exec said. “If the stock does well, then the CEO should do really should do much better. And if the stock doesn’t do well, the CEOs should not. And so, I think alignment is critically important.”
Zaslav acknowledged that compensation wound up becoming an issue in the dual strikes of 2023, but he said much of the labor strife stemmed from “the fact that the industry was changing so quickly.” Negotiating parties “didn’t quite know exactly how to fairly compensate and we were arguing about how do you fairly compensate on a streaming service versus a cable channel. … Ultimately, the goal has to be pay your people and have them feel that they’re paid fairly and seen and valued.”
Zaslav was asked directly by moderator Andy Serwer about the “scrum” over Paramount Global, whose controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, is evaluating multiple merger offers. Asked if he’s interested in doing a deal with Paramount, which he and former CEO Bob Bakish discussed last December, Zaslav didn’t offer a straightforward answer.
“I know Shari well and they have a lot of great people there,” he said. “It’s in our interest for them to be successful. So however it turns out, I hope that they’re successful,” he said. “Our focus is to create more content and be on more platforms so that people spend more time and are willing to spend more money for what we create.”
Similarly, a request for an update on NBA rights talks netted only a partial answer. Zaslav said the company remains “in constructive negotiations with the NBA.” He added, “It’s a great league. The TNT team does a terrific job. And we love the NBA.” Zaslav then took a left turn into the movie business and HBO programming, saying it is a “shared experience” similar to live sports.
With the NBA expected to formalize deals in the coming days with Amazon and Disney-ESPN, one major chunk of rights remains contested. NBCUniversal has reportedly made an aggressive offer in the range of $2.5 billion a year to take over WBD’s position. WBD has the right to match NBCU, but the company is laboring to pay down debt and is managing through a period of ongoing linear TV decline. Last month, the exclusive negotiating window for incumbents Disney and WBD expired.