David Zaslav’s generous — and unpopular — pay package is about to change.
Amid a split of Warner Bros. Discovery, which will see the company’s TV networks and streamer Discovery+ spun off into a new, separate entity, the WBD compensation committee is revising the structure of Zaslav’s compensation.
Zaslav, the Warner Bros. Discovery president and CEO, will stay behind with the studios and HBO and Max — in other words, with the good stuff. His longtime chief financial officer Gunnar Wiedenfels will serve as CEO of the spinoff company.
The WBD compensation committee says it has redesigned Zaslav’s package to better “incentivize his critical contributions.” A “significant portion” of Zaslav’s target annual compensation will be comprised of less cash and more longterm equity incentives.
And oh yeah, there’s one other piece motivating today’s change: shareholders hate Zaslav’s previous pay structure. Or as WBD generously put it in a Monday 8-K filing, one of the “goals” here is to “address stockholder feedback and preferences with respect to CEO compensation structure.”
Zaslav’s new performance metrics for bonuses — both cash and equity — are set to be a moving target. His base salary will be $3 million; following the split, his target annual cash bonus opportunity will be reduced to $6 million. The actual payout is TBD based on some goals to come. The annual bonus payout will be capped at 200 percent the target amount. His 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.
More to come.
