Media mogul John Malone is opening up about advising David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, on his new contract with the media giant.
In an interview with the New York Times about his memoir Born to be Wired, Malone, Zaslav’s longtime mentor, told the publication that he recently advised the WBD boss on a new contract that would maximize his potential for generating long-term wealth but also dampen down public criticism that surrounded previous pay deals by keeping the headline figure of the package “skinny.”
In April, The Hollywood Reporter reported that Zaslav received a 2024 compensation package worth $51.9 million, compared with $49.7 million in 2023 and $39.3 million in 2022 when the Discovery-WarnerMedia merger closed. However, in June, WBD shareholders voted to reject the 2024 compensation packages of its top executives, including Zaslav.
“It doesn’t look like it’s all that generous, but in reality, it’s your path to meaningful wealth,” Malone opined to the Times about Zaslav’s new pay deal. The restructure of Zaslav’s compensation package is now based on the performance of the company’s stock, which Malone believes will encourage Zaslav “to think like a shareholder,” per the Times. (The newspaper also noted that a spokesman for Malone later told the publication that he was not on the compensation committee of WBD and had no role in deciding Zaslav’s compensation.)
The WBD compensation committee redesigned Zaslav’s package to better “incentivize his critical contributions.” The changes to Zaslav’s pay structure partly “address stockholder feedback and preferences with respect to CEO compensation structure,” WBD said in an 8-K filing in June.
Zaslav’s base salary will remain $3 million, but following the split, his target annual cash bonus opportunity will be reduced to $6 million (from $24 million in 2024). Zaslav’s equity awards will have a target value of $15.5 million in year one; the target will be reduced to $7.5 million for the following years.
In the interview, Malone revealed that he texts Zaslav daily and also advised the executive on WBD’s rights negotiations with the NBA, counseling his protégé to not spend billions. In summer 2024, WBD’s TNT Sports ultimately lost the rights to the NBA after holding them for 35 years.
Elsewhere in the interview, Malone spoke on CNN, having written in his memoir that the network is “a shadow of what its founder had envisioned” and an issue with its network’s employees is that they “express their opinions too much in their news” adding that Zaslav had been “unable to have any meaningful impact” in fixing it.
“They can’t help themselves,” Malone said. “And so what you’ve got is a left-leaning, anti-Trump news service.”
Malone noted that the network’s next plan will be a paid subscription service, in which viewers can stream hours of CNN video without a cable subscription.
In Malone’s Born to Be Wired memoir, releasing Sept. 2 by Simon & Schuster, he “shares stories from behind the scenes of the most transformative deals in media, entertainment, and technology” and “offers an insider’s account of launching television’s first cable networks—including Discovery, TBS, QVC, and BET—and the strategy behind era-defining mergers, from Warner Bros. Discovery to Live Nation Entertainment.”
In an excerpt shared with THR, Malone reflected on his friendly rivalries with Reed Hastings, Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner and how he built a sprawling empire while living with autism.
Tony Maglio contributed to this report.