David Zaslav is unemployed. But he receives a prodigious $606 million for leaving Warner Bros. Discovery, the company he merged and ran for more than four years before it agreed to be acquired by David Ellison’s Paramount.
Zaslav, who was chairman and CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, will receive a total of $606.1 million for shares held in the company (including restricted stock units converted into the right to receive cash) beginning 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 are subject to withholding taxes (as is the RSU amount). Its income is subject to capital gains tax. Zaslav also had 14.98 million stock options that became worthless after the merger because their exercise prices exceeded the transaction’s $31.0167/share acquisition price.
Additionally, Zaslav has sold a total of nearly $200 million worth of WBD stock since his company closed the deal with Paramount in February.
On Tuesday, October 6, Paramount officially closed its purchase of WBD (and promptly painted “A Skydance Corporation” on the famous Warner Bros. water tower in Burbank). In addition to Zaslav, other top executives at Warner Bros. Discovery absentees include CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels; Bruce Campbell, chief revenue and strategy officer; Pamela Abdy and Michael De Luca, co-chairmen of Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group; and Scott Miller, president of networks and streaming distribution.
Among other Warner Bros. executives. who received millions from the Paramount buyout include Wiedenfels, Campbell, WBD international head Gerhard Zeiler (who is making a run in Austrian politics) and JB Perrette, WBD’s former streaming and gaming head who joined Ellison’s Skydance as co-president and business director of the 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 programs for Zaslav and other named executives as well as their 2025 compensation plans.
Over the years, Zaslav and his lieutenants have made job cuts at Warner Bros. Discovery to reduce costs and improve operational efficiency. At the same time, Zaslav more than doubled the number of employees holding shares in WBD compared to the two companies separately previously.
He is credited with improving WBD’s financial profile, even in the midst of a heavy debt load that the company managed to reduce from $53 billion in gross debt in md-2022 to $33.1 billion in June 2026. WBD’s debt has now been taken over by the new company Skydance, which faces a staggering $80 billion in debt.
RELATED: David Zaslav Bids Farewell to Warner Bros. Employees in a video on the eve of the closing of the Skydance merger: “It was a great honor to stand with you all”
For the whole of 2022, Warner Bros. Discovery reported a pro forma EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) loss of approximately $2.1 billion. In 2025, it generated EBITDA profit of $1.4 billion and is on track to achieve double-digit growth in subscriber revenue growth in 2026.
Zaslav is among the highest paid CEOs in media. In 2025, his compensation amounted to $165 million. This included a one-time grant of stock options worth $109.6 million, which the company granted to Zaslav in June 2025 for his work on the proposed split of the company into two publicly traded entities (one housing the HBO business, HBO Max, and WB Studios; the other largely consisting of the linear television network business as well as Discovery+ and other assets). The split of WBD into two companies did not occur due to the company’s agreement to sell to Paramount Skydance.
Gn entert
