By Joe Flint
David Zaslav is finally having his moment.
Since merging his cable programming behemoth Discovery with storied entertainment company Warner Bros. in 2022, Zaslav has often been a punching bag for Hollywood.
He has taken heat for cutting costs, scrapping movies and laying off thousands -- while being awarded a lavish compensation package as the company's stock slid year after year. The chief executive was even booed while delivering a commencement speech at Boston University during the 2023 writer's strike.
But with Friday's deal to sell a big chunk of the company to Netflix, the 65-year-old executive is undoing what he built, forging a deal with a streaming giant for top dollar -- and may end up getting the last laugh.
In an industry-shaking deal, Netflix agreed to buy Warner Bros. and HBO for $72 billion. The sale is expected to close in the next 12 to 18 months, after Zaslav completes his earlier plan to spin off the Warner Discovery cable assets including TNT and CNN into their own stand-alone company. There is also likely to be a lengthy and challenging regulatory review.
It's Netflix's biggest deal ever, one of the largest transactions announced this year and a stark contrast to Warner's value just a few years ago. When WarnerMedia was spun out of AT&T and merged with Discovery, the combined company had a market value of about $60 billion.
Netflix's cash-and-stock transaction represents a coup for the man that all of Hollywood calls DZ. He had told associates that he wanted to sell to a high-profile tech company, rather than David Ellison's Paramount, which aggressively sought to purchase the entire company.
Zaslav started out as a lawyer at General Electric when it owned NBC, making distribution deals for its cable networks and ascending the executive ranks. His key mentors were legendary GE CEO Jack Welch and John Malone, considered the godfather of the modern-day cable industry.
He left NBC to become CEO of Discovery, where he took a bland group of cable channels and turned them into a reality-TV juggernaut. Like Welch, Zaslav was always on the lookout for savings. He made steep job cuts there and again after his next merger, the 2018 deal to buy Scripps Networks and its channels, including Food Network and HGTV, for $12 billion. With cord-cutting starting to eat into the cable business, Zaslav staked out his next big bet, a merger with AT&T's WarnerMedia.
"We saw the cliff that was ahead for the linear business," said Malone, then a board member at Discovery, in an interview.
Initially Zaslav was welcomed as a conquering hero who would save Warner from the evils of telecom executives who didn't understand showbiz. He set himself up in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel and often held court at the salmon-pink polo lounge, where he met with high-powered agents and producers.
He had Jack Warner's desk moved into his office on the Warner Bros. lot. He had already bought the Beverly Hills home once owned by the late legendary Paramount chief Robert Evans for $16 million in 2020. He then spent millions to remodel the property.
But there was no happy ending. Soon Zaslav saw that he'd inherited a lot of headaches along with great properties. He felt that Warner had too many fiefdoms that needed to be broken down and consolidated.
"We realized after the closing that we weren't exactly getting what we thought," Malone said.
Strikes by writers and actors in 2023 also slowed the industry to a halt at a time when studios were trying to ramp up production to better compete with Netflix and other streamers.
Saddled with a heavy debt load from the AT&T deal, Zaslav oversaw numerous cost-cutting efforts that often led to bad blood at the company, and across Hollywood. At the same time though, he installed new leadership at the movie studio, which began spending heavily to land high-profile projects.
It paid off this year with several hits, including a new "Superman" movie and "Sinners."
"They've gone from struggling to the leading movie studio," Malone said of the Warner turnaround, adding "the heritage has been fulfilled."
On the TV front, Zaslav pushed hard to build HBO Max's global streaming presence, and the service is still known for having deep pockets to make shows such as "White Lotus" and "The Last of Us."
Zaslav took heat for not keeping the rights to NBA broadcasts, which were a staple of the TNT network. But even without the NBA, the network was still able to keep its distribution fees at the same level in new deals with Comcast, Charter and others.
Zaslav is not shy about being in the spotlight -- whether in floor seats for New York Knicks games at Madison Square Garden or on a red carpet. Ever the entertainer, the night before initial bids for Warner Discovery were due last month, Zaslav held court at a dinner party at his Beverly Hills residence where the guest list included Oprah Winfrey, Margot Robbie and CAA superagent Bryan Lourd.
Yet he's also a workaholic known for firing off texts to subordinates and colleagues as early as 4 a.m.
Zaslav's outsize pay packages have garnered plenty of criticism, especially since the company's stock was in decline for much of his tenure. Warner Bros. Discovery reached its peak market cap within days of the 2022 merger -- a record that stood until Friday, when it soared on news of the Netflix deal and closed with a valuation of $64.6 billion.
But Malone said that criticism isn't fair.
"He got criticized for a long while for being over paid but a lot of that was phony," because the compensation was tied to stock performance that never materialized, Malone said.
Paramount's aggressive efforts to acquire Warner threw a wrench into Zaslav's long-term plans, which were to split the company in two and then afterward talk to potential suitors for the studio and streaming assets. The sense among Warner executives and their advisers was that Paramount was trying to lowball the company.
At the same time, Netflix was quietly sniffing around Warner. An unwelcome offer was not Netflix's style but once the for sale sign went up it went into sprint mode. Zaslav had long talked with associates about the possibility of a tech firm wanting Warner so Paramount's unwelcome advances ended up turning into an opportunity.
Write to Joe Flint at Joe.Flint@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 05, 2025 18:48 ET (23:48 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
