David Zaslav is out of a job. But he’s getting a prodigious sum of $606 million as he leaves Warner Bros. Discovery, the company he fused together and led for more than four years before it agreed to be acquired by David Ellison’s Paramount.
Zaslav, who was Warner Bros. Discovery’s president and CEO, will receive a total of $606.1 million for shares held in the company (including restricted stock units that converted into the right to receive an amount in cash) effective Oct. 6 with the closing of the Paramount-WBD merger, according to an SEC filing Thursday.
The total amount includes stock options worth $381.7 million, which is subject to withholding taxes (as is the amount from the RSUs). Zaslav also had 14.98 million stock options that became worthless post-merger because they had exercise prices that exceeded the deal’s $31.0167/share acquisition price.
In addition, Zaslav has sold a total of nearly $200 million worth of WBD stock since his company clinched the deal with Paramount in February.
On Tuesday, Oct. 6, Paramount officially closed the WBD takeover (and swiftly painted “A Skydance Corporation” on the famous Warner Bros. water tower in Burbank). In addition to Zaslav, other top Warner Bros. Discovery execs who are out include CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels; Bruce Campbell, chief revenue and strategy officer; Pamela Abdy and Michael De Luca, co-chairs of Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group; and Scott Miller, president of networks and streaming distribution.
Other Warner Bros. execs who received millions from the Paramount takeover included Wiedenfels, Campbell, WBD head of international Gerhard Zeiler (who is making a run at Austrian politics) and JB Perrette, previously WBD’s head of streaming and games who has joined Ellison’s Skydance as co-chair and chief business officer of both Skydance TV and Skydance DTC streaming divisions.
At WBD’s annual shareholder meeting in June, in symbolic gestures, a majority of shareholders voted against golden-parachute packages for Zaslav and other named execs as well as their 2025 compensation plans.
Over the years, Zaslav and his lieutenants made job cuts across Warner Bros. Discovery to reduce costs and improve operating efficiency. At the same time, Zaslav more than doubled the number of employees who held equity in WBD compared with the two companies separately beforehand.
He is credited with improving WBD’s financial profile, even amid a heavy debt load that the company managed to reduce from $53 billion of gross debt in md-2022 to $33.1 billion as of June 2026. WBD’s debt has now been assumed by the newly formed Skydance, which is facing an eye-popping $80 billion in debt.
RELATED: David Zaslav Bids Farewell to Warner Bros. Employees in Video on Eve of Skydance Merger Close: ‘It’s Been a Great Honor to Be Alongside All of You’
For full-year 2022, Warner Bros. Discovery had a pro-forma EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) loss of about $2.1 billion. In 2025, it generated EBITDA profit of $1.4 billion and has been on track for double-digit percentage growth in subscriber-related revenue growth in 2026.
Zaslav has been among the most highly compensated CEOs in media. In 2025, his pay package totaled $165 million. That included a one-time grant of stock options valued at $109.6 million, which the company awarded to Zaslav in June 2025 for his work on the company’s plan to split into two publicly traded entities (one housing WB’s HBO, HBO Max and studios business; the other largely composed of the linear TV network business along with Discovery+ and other assets). The WBD split into two companies did not proceed because of the deal to sell the company to Paramount Skydance.
About The Author
