David Zaslav Says the Best Part About the Election Result Is That He’ll Get to Do More Mergers
In this week’s election, the country’s decision to return Donald Trump to the White House centered around its anxieties about the economy — specifically, the concern that Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav doesn’t own enough of it.
After Zaslav took charge of his media conglomerate following the merger between Discovery and Warner Media in May 2021, the combination of bonuses, stock options and regular compensation increased his net worth by nearly one quarter of a billion dollars in his first year on the job. As such, it should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with soon-to-be-President-again Donald Trump’s proposed tax cuts for the super rich that Zaslav is downright giddy to get the next administration started, but Zaslav’s excitement for the next four years extends far beyond the usual perks of being a rich guy living in a country that’s run by an even richer guy.
During Warner Bros. Discovery’s third-quarter 2024 earnings call earlier today, Zaslav praised Trump’s victory to shareholders, saying, “We have an upcoming new administration. It’s too early to tell, but it may offer a pace of change and an opportunity for consolidation that may be quite different, that would provide a real positive and accelerated impact on this industry that’s needed.”
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So the official stance of WBD is that the cure to the entertainment industry’s woes is for Zaslav to buy out the remaining companies he doesn’t already own, just so that he can refuse to release everyone else’s movies, too.
It may come as a surprise to anyone who is currently overpaying for a Max subscription that Zaslav’s plan to capitalize on the upcoming Trump administration includes buying up even more of the entertainment industry when, on the consumer level, the last three years of his reign have been entirely defined by what he’s taken away rather than what he’s added. Zaslav famously cancelled multiple completed movies to secure tax breaks, dooming the well-tested, half-cartoon and half-live-action comedy Coyote vs. Acme to die in the darkness long after post-production had ended.
On top of that, the Max library seems to shrink on a weekly basis as Zaslav continues to scrub legacy content from the platform, and he’s entirely done away with his company’s smaller streaming services such as Boomerang during his purge.
However, as economic experts expect the Trump administration to reverse President Biden’s regulatory resistance to corporate mega-mergers and monopolistic industry consolidation, Zaslav says that WBD will be first in line to swallow up the smaller fishes come January. “These are great companies, and if the best content is going to win, there needs to be some consolidation in order to have these businesses be stronger and have a better consumer experience,” Zaslav said of his list of targets, though he didn’t identify which entertainment companies he wants to hijack and then crash by name.
“This is an industry that really needs to meaningfully consolidate,” Zaslav reflected of the current state of entertainment, before hilariously claiming, “And it’s really driven by the consumer experience.”
To a certain degree, he’s right: American cord-cutters have long been complaining about the proliferation of premium streaming platforms, and it would be nice to only have to pay for one singular service that could offer every last one of our favorite TV shows and movies but chooses not to.
