Former Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav collected a massive windfall (more than $600 million) for orchestrating the company’s $110 billion sale to Paramount – but he wasn’t alone.
Zaslav’s top deputies also made out extremely well from the combination under new corporate parent Skydance, which closed this week, according to SEC filings. Streaming and games chief JB Perrette, CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels and uber-distribution boss Bruce Campbell each took home payouts of between $120 million and $150 million, while international chief Gerhard Zeiler also pocketed around $90 million.
Together, the quintet of top execs collected more than $1.1 billion in merger-related compensation. In media and entertainment history, only the IPO and subsequent privatization of Ari Emanuel’s Endeavor Group Holdings rivals the merger in terms of executive compensation pegged to an M&A deal.
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Perrette could elect to defer the merger payout given that he is remaining in the exec fold at Skydance. Also, the windfalls are subject to taxes and withholdings, and stock options are vested on varying schedules. Several execs also had previously sold WBD shares, meaning this week hasn’t been a one-off income event for them.
While Zaslav is due to end up a billionaire from the deal, a company rep tells Deadline that he made efforts to share the upside opportunity across the company. Nearly half of the company’s 35,500 total employees had equity in the company as of this week’s merger close, up from about 8,500 in 2022.
Given the significant appreciation of the formerly moribund share price over the past year, about 500 employees now have more than $1 million apiece in equity, as the New York Post noted.
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Many others beyond the Big Five also recorded sizable paydays. Chief Legal Officer Priya Aiyar, a former American Airlines executive and deputy counsel with the U.S. Treasury and Energy departments, joined WBD in February 2025 but still managed to receive more than $57 million from the merger, for example. Debra Lee, the former BET CEO who served on the board of WBD, collected $1.3 million, while former board chair Samuel Di Piazza got $3.1 million. Ken Lowe, who sold Scripps Networks Interactive to Zaslav’s Discovery Communications for $14.6 billion in 2018 and then served on the WBD board, walked away with $18.1 million from the Skydance deal.
Zeiler was a holdover from the Time Warner and WarnerMedia eras, while Perrette, Wiedenfels and Campbell each played key roles at Discovery, which Zaslav took public as CEO in 2008. They helped take the company to new heights with the unlikely $43 billion merger with WarnerMedia in 2022 and then this year’s combination with Paramount. Along the way, they were given annual pay packages that often ranked among the richest in corporate America.
The Reverse Morris Trust transaction that combined Discovery with WarnerMedia was the brainchild of John Malone, the longtime Discovery investor and billionaire media sage who has long been a key advisor to Zaslav. Across the other companies controlled by Malone, notably Liberty Media, top executives have also recorded lavish compensation over the years.
WBD’s stock spent the majority of the post-Discovery merger period significantly underwater, but Zaslav and his team managed to draw acquisition interest from multiple bidders after declaring their intention to split into two companies.
After rebuffing an initial offer from Paramount at $18 a share, they accepted Netflix’s offer for the studios-and-streaming part of the company at $27.75 before finalizing with Paramount.