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Warner Bros. Discovery CEOs bidding war destroyed the initial confidence of the Ellisons but dont count them out just yet
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.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...