What are the salary and net worth of David Zaslav?

Media executive David Zaslav is worth a whopping $400 million. At Warner Bros. Discovery, which was created in 2022 by the merger of Discovery and WarnerMedia, David Zaslav holds the positions of president and CEO. He oversaw the transition from educational programming to reality television at Discovery, where he served as CEO and president. Discovery’s networks included HGTV, TLC, Animal Planet, Food Network, and the Oprah Winfrey Network. In his capacity as CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, Zaslav is in charge of HBO, CNN, TNT, TBS, Warner Brothers film and TV studio, and the aforementioned reality networks.

More recently, Zaslav has come under fire for his business practices, which have included removing a large number of titles from the streaming service Max in bulk and frequently abandoning half-completed projects to claim tax deductions.

Pay

In 2006, David began working for Discovery, the media empire owned by John Malone. From 2006 until the end of 2022, David received compensation totaling $750 million. David Zaslav currently makes $3.1 million a year in base pay, but his annual compensation can increase substantially with stock grants and bonuses. As an illustration:

In 2008, Discovery went public. As a result, according to 2009 filings, he made $11.7 million the year before. In the subsequent year, he made $42.6 million.

Discovery Communications paid David $152 million in salary in 2014. As a result, he was the highest-paid corporate executive globally for that particular year.

He made $129.4 million in 2018.

David Zaslav received $246.6 million in compensation in total in 2021. The grant of $203 million in stock options constituted the great majority of that compensation.

He made $39 million in 2022. That was identified as:

• $3.1 million base pay
• $12 million awards for stocks
• $1.4 million in stock options
• $21.8 million bonus or “non-equity incentive plan comp”
• $925,489 in compensation for “other”

Childhood and Schooling

On January 15, 1960, David Zaslav was born into a Jewish family in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. He is of Polish and Ukrainian descent. He attended Ramapo High School after moving to Ramapo, New York, with his family when he was eight years old. Zaslav continued his education and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 1982 from Binghamton University. After that, he enrolled at Boston University School of Law, where he graduated in 1985 with honors. Zaslav was first employed by LeBoeuf, Lamb, Lieby and MacRae as a lawyer.

NBCUniversal

Zaslav joined NBC in 1989. He rose to the position of president of the division responsible for domestic TV, cable, and new media distribution. In this role, he managed content distribution and negotiated NBCUniversal networks’ carriage on cable and satellite. In addition, Zaslav was in charge of managing a number of NBCUniversal channels, such as National Geographic, A&E, Telemundo, Bravo, and the History Channel. He also had a significant role in the development and introduction of the news networks MSNBC and CNBC.

Finding out

Zaslav succeeded Judith McHale as CEO of Discovery towards the end of 2006. He was in charge of the creation and introduction of several new networks at the company, such as Planet Green, Velocity, and OWN. He also tried to change the focus of the programming from educational content to more reality television. Discovery went public in 2008 and was listed on the Fortune 500 in 2014 under Zaslav’s direction. The business bought Scripps Networks Interactive in 2018.

Discovery by Warner Bros.

Zaslav oversaw the combination of WarnerMedia and Discovery to form Warner Bros. Discovery in the spring of 2022. He was given an executive compensation package consisting of a $3 million salary, a $22 million bonus, and a contract extension with $190 million in stock options. As CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, Zaslav faced criticism for his business decisions right away. In particular, he was criticized for drastically cutting the content library of the company’s streaming service, HBO Max, which was later rebranded as Max, in order to claim tax write-offs.  Holiday Haunt.” The overall deducted loss from Warner Bros. Discovery’s market capitalization was nearly $25 billion.

When Zaslav named Chris Licht as CNN’s CEO without first interviewing any internal candidates, he came under increased fire. After that, Licht tried to win over more conservative Americans to CNN; however, he was fired in the middle of 2023. When Zaslav oversaw significant cuts to the network Turner Classic Movies, the public’s ire only grew. Filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese met with Zaslav in response, seeking assurances that TCM would be protected.

Awards and Honors

The Steven J. Ross Humanitarian Award was presented to Zaslav by the United Jewish Appeal Federation of New York in 2012. Two years later, Syracuse University’s S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications presented him with the Fred Dressler Leadership Award. Zaslav was inducted into the Cable Hall of Fame in 2017 and included in Time’s list of the “100 Most Influential People” in 2022.

Private Life and Property

David met Pam, the woman he would marry, in high school. Alison, Jamie, and Jordan are their three children as of right now. The family owns several houses across the nation.

Ten years later, in 2010, Conan O’Brien’s seven-bedroom Central Park West duplex cost the Zaslav family $25 million.

They spent $24.65 million in December 2012 on a 7,000 square foot house in East Hampton. Situated on 1.7 acres of oceanfront, the mansion has eight bedrooms.

They spent $16 million for a Beverly Hills mansion in January 2020. The seller was the estate of Robert Evans, the producer. Evans paid $290,000 for the house in the 1960s. He gave it the name “Woodland.” After being found guilty of drug trafficking and experiencing a professional setback in the 1980s, Evans was compelled to sell the house.

The Zaslavs put their 6,750-square-foot Greenwich Village townhouse up for sale in May 2021 for $18 million. Their purchase price was $11.8 million in 2016.