from the enshittify-ALL-the-things! dept
We’ve well established that the AT&T–>Time Warner–>Discovery series of media mergers were some of the dumbest, most pointless “business” exercises ever conceived by the extraction class.
The utterly senseless saga burned through hundreds of billions in debt, saw more than 50,000+ people lose their jobs, killed off numerous popular brands, created oceans of animosity among creatives, and resulted in major brands like CNN and Max becoming arguably dumber and of notably lower quality than when the entire expensive gambit began years earlier.
The brunchlord in charge of much of that dysfunction, Time Warner CEO David Zaslav, has seen absolutely zero accountability for this chaos, and, in fact, has been broadly rewarded with a series of massive compensation packages that in absolutely no way reflect his competency.
Zaslav saw himself richly rewarded recently with yet another 4% pay raise, bringing his annual compensation to $52 million. Other C-suite executives are doing well for themselves:
“CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels received $17 million (flat with his 2023 compensation), chief revenue and strategy officer Bruce Campbell was at $19.8 million (an 8% increase), global streaming and games CEO and president J.B. Perrette’s compensation was $19.7 million (down 2%) and international president Gerhard Zeiler earned $14.8 million (up more than 11%).”
This pointless gambit goes back further to the bungled AOL merger with Time Warner. And Zaslav has made it clear with Trump 2.0 back to rubber stamping harmful, shitty mergers again (and his FCC dismantling what’s left of U.S. media consolidation limits), there’s likely even more pointless media consolidation on the horizon.
The purpose here isn’t building a quality product people like or a sustainable business. It’s a “growth for growth’s sake” shell game designed to grab tax cuts and temporarily boost stock valuations with the illusion of functional progress and illusory growth, overseen by incompetents looking to justify wildly disproportionate executive compensation.
I like to play a little game every time Warner Bros Discovery or Zaslav are in the news: try to find one article that mentions the problems caused by mindless media consolidation, or the 50,000 layoffs since these deals started with AT&T’s doomed purchase of Time Warner.
You can’t find it. The very obvious enshittification — and the vast human wreckage caused by this purely extractive, highly performative exercise, almost never warrant a contextual mention. These folks don’t think real world harms are relevant to the story they’re telling themselves.
Filed Under: brunchlord, consolidation, david zalsav, layoffs, media, mergers, streaming, video
Companies: warner bros. discovery
