Posted in: Movies, Opinion, TV, TV | Tagged: David Zaslav, opinion, warner bros discovery

Warner Bros. Discovery Shareholders No Fans of David Zaslav's 2024 Pay

A majority of voting Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders made it clear they weren't fans of what CEO David Zaslav and others are getting paid.

One thing we could never understand is why Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) CEO David Zaslav gets the level of grief he gets while The Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger gets treated like a rockstar. Just to be clear, that's not meant to defend Zaslav. It's more to make the point that they both made some pretty bad decisions during "The Streaming Wars," when everyone thought they could knock Netflix off the throne. The fallout from that has resulted in a whole lot of folks losing their jobs and production budgets on films and television series (especially television, in the case of Disney) being rolled back dramatically. Unfortunately for Zaslav, despite some recent successes on the cinematic side, a clear majority of WBD shareholders aren't fans of what Zaslav and other top executives are getting paid.

During the multimedia company's annual stockholders meeting on Monday, June 2nd, investors gave a thumbs down to a non-binding advisory measure that would approve the 2024 compensation packages for Zaslav and a number of other executives. According to the numbers in WBD's SEC filing, 724.5 million shares voted in favor of the executive compensation package advisory – while 1.06 billion shares voted down the measure (with 5.69 million shares not voting/abstaining and 307.38 million broker non-votes). In terms of a percentage, that means nearly 60% of the voters voted against giving a thumbs up to the packages.

What were those pay packages? In terms of 2024, Zaslav was looking at about a 4% bump to $51.9 million (with a base salary of $3 million, stock awards worth $23.1 million, bonus compensation worth $23.9 million, and "all other" compensation clocking in at $1.9 million). In terms of the previous years, 2023 saw Zaslav walk away with $49.7 million, while 2022 saw Zaslav pocket $39.3 million. As for the other executives listed, we're looking at $17 million for CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels, $19.8 million for chief revenue and strategy officer Bruce Campbell, $19.7 million for global streaming and games CEO and president J.B. Perrette, and $14.8 million for international president Gerhard Zeiler.

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