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Who Is David Zaslav and Why Is Everybody Yelling at Him?

Life is hard for a multimillionaire media executive at war with the world..

Poor David Zaslav! The guy just wants to launch his new streaming network while also hosting an enormous party in the south of France, but everyone keeps shouting at him. On Twitter , on picket lines, at a college commencement ceremony: nothing but grief! How did this particular mega-millionaire media exec become this week’s defining symbol of capitalism’s gross excesses?

Who is David Zaslav?

He is the 63-year-old CEO and president of Warner Bros. Discovery, the company that was formed when the Zaslav-headed Discovery Inc. gobbled up WarnerMedia in 2022.

What was David Zaslav’s week supposed to look like?

This was a big week for Zaslav! He was invited to deliver the commencement address at Boston University, the place he went to law school. Quite an honor. This was also the week that his company launched its new streaming service, Max, which will carry selections from the combined libraries of HBO, Warner Bros., the Discovery Channel, and more. Plus, he was headed to Cannes for a big party to celebrate 100 years of Warner Bros. Yes, the Writers Guild strike is still roiling Hollywood. (Slate staffers are members of the Writers Guild’s news division and are therefore not on strike.) Still, that all really sounds like fun.

How did his commencement address go?

One minute and 21 seconds into the speech, a person in the audience shouted, “Fuck you, you piece of shit!” during a pause between sentences.

You can really see him being like, Jesus, do I have to do this whole speech? The mirrored shades he wore up on the podium helped mask how uncomfortable he felt, although they also had the effect of making him look like, well, a caricature of an unfeeling millionaire.

What was his speech about?

It was boilerplate “Five Things I Learned on My Journey” fare, a chance for him to tell his career and life story while also making points like “Do what you love” and “Never get outworked.” Through pretty much the entire speech, a vocal portion of the student body booed him and chanted “Pay your writers!” [ Clap, clap, clap clap clap. ]

At one point Zaslav cited Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, telling him that it was important to get along with everyone, even though “some people will be looking for a fight.” That got a big Bronx cheer, and Zaslav delivered a jaunty thumbs-up. Toward the end of the speech, he quoted his father’s wisdom: “Be respectful of other people, and everything is possible.” Then he repeated that line, for emphasis. This led to his only real ovation, from the non-protesters in the crowd (and many professors and administrators on the dais).

Did anyone notice all the booing?

Here are stories about David Zaslav getting booed on NBC , CBS , NPR , the Hollywood Reporter , Vanity Fair , the New York Post , WBUR , Entertainment Weekly , Reuters , and the Los Angeles Times .

That’s a lot of noticing.

Also noticing: Bernie Sanders.

Aren’t there other overpaid executives who could just as easily turn into whipping boys for the sins of an entire industry?

Sure! Netflix has two CEOs , for example, who also make enormous amounts of money and have surely stiffed way more WGA members in their careers than even David Zaslav, who’s spent a lot of his career working in unscripted TV. But Zaslav really seems to have a knack for stepping on rakes in public since he assumed power at the new company, starting with his decision to kill a bunch of projects (including some, like Batgirl , that were basically in the can ) as a tax write-off. Just last week he made news for being basically the only person on earth defending CNN chief Chris Licht’s decision to host a Donald Trump town hall. (CNN is part of Warner Bros. Discovery; it does not appear that CNN covered Zaslav’s BU speech .) Plus, as you can see from that story about CNN, he cannot stop wearing those sunglasses in photos.

Well, at least his new product launch must have gone great.

Well, people already thought it was sort of dumb that Zaslav’s new company was taking a well-respected, beloved brand (HBO) and combining it with stuff like Dr. Pimple Popper and shoving it all into a new app with a name most people my age, at least, associate with soft-core porn. Then, as many onetime subscribers discovered, if you opened up your old HBO Max app, you didn’t get any kind of message telling you to visit all your favorite shows at their new home, Max. Instead, here’s what you saw:

That’s not ideal, but that’s just a UI problem, easily fixable. I bet—

Then a Film Twitter personality with the delightful sobriquet “John Frankensteiner” noticed that on the new Max, directors and writers were no longer individually credited —just lumped into a new category called “Creators,” such that, for example, Martin Scorsese was listed as one of the “Creators” of Raging Bull alongside seven other people, including screenwriter Paul Schrader, producer Irwin Winkler, and real-life boxer Jake LaMotta. Immediately, the Directors Guild, which had previously clashed mildly with the writers about the strike , released a statement joining the WGA in decrying the change . “This devaluation of the individual contributions of artists is a disturbing trend and the DGA will not stand for it,” said union president Lesli Linka Glatter. It was a show of solidarity of the type a striking union might dream of. Within hours, Warner Bros. Discovery had pledged to fix the credits , claiming that it was “an oversight.”

Whew! Rough week for that company. Presumably David Zaslav was managing all these crises, right?

Well, he was in the south of France, introducing the new jewel in HBO’s—uh, Max’s—crown, the Sam Levinson/the Weeknd series The Idol , which premiered at Cannes . Slate’s Sam Adams echoed the feelings of most critics when he compared the show’s artistry and subtlety to a bukkake video.

What’s a bu—

Don’t Google it!!!!

Is this where the party happened?

Yes! Co-hosted with Graydon Carter, former editor of Vanity Fair and current editor of upmarket newsletter Air Mail, the party was held at the Hôtel du Cap. Dom Pérignon, a sponsor, kept everyone awash in Champagne, and the guest list was star-studded: Leonardo DiCaprio, Scarlett Johansson, Lily-Rose Depp, even famed Creator Martin Scorsese. New York magazine’s Shawn McCreesh got a chance to ask Zaslav how he’s feeling about the strike, and the mogul struck a careful tone: “Look, it’s painful, because some of my best friends are writers and there’s no way that you can tell great stories—and this entire business is dependent on great writers and great stories—and so ultimately I’m the biggest advocate for great writers, and not only should they be paid fairly, but they should feel fully valued. And so that’s the journey, and I hope it gets settled quickly.”

Well, that’s pretty good. Surely this party was not covered, at least by business-friendly outlets like the Wall Street Journal, in a way that suggests that all the people David Zaslav hangs out with are out-of-touch rich idiots who have no idea what everyday people are dealing with?

Well, what’s next for David Zaslav?

“I have to get back to my journey now,” Zaslav said at the end of his BU speech, to a chorus of boos. “Because I’m still going. More to do, more to see, and more to learn.” Luckily, as noted in innumerable picket signs, WGA press releases, and tweets, he earned $246.6 million in compensation in 2021 . So, shout all you want, striking writers and starry-eyed college graduates! David Zaslav’s journey, despite everything, is likely to be a smooth one.

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David Zaslav and Graydon Carter’s Champagne-Soaked Cannes Buddy Movie

Tuesday night, thousands of miles away from the writers’ strike that has paralyzed and polarized a post-pandemic Hollywood, Warner Bros. celebrated its centennial — encompassing almost the entire history of the movie industry, including several bygone golden ages — from the rarefied clifftop confines of the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc outside Cannes.

The party was being thrown in partnership with Graydon Carter’s weekly newsletter Air Mail, which meant that it would be something of a reprise of the glory days of the parties Carter once threw here when he edited Vanity Fair . Everybody who was in town for the film festival wanted to be invited, even if they were nervous that opulent optics were a bad look amid the labor disputes. Certain Hollywood types fretted about whether toasting Warner — and by extension its recently crowned king, CEO David Zaslav (or Zas, as he’s already been mono-named) — was entirely, you know, the right thing to do quite so openly. Just a few days before, Zaslav had been heckled by protesters shouting “Pay your writers!” and “We don’t want you here!” while giving the commencement address at his alma mater, Boston University. Disputes with the Directors Guild and the Screen Actors Guild are brewing, too. Netflix’s Ted Sarandos even pulled out of the PEN Gala in Manhattan last week for fear of picketers causing a scene. Meanwhile, sniffed the purists, Zaslav had just renamed the nearly three-year-old streamer HBO Max to just … Max? Has he no respect for history ?

Still, all of that melodrama felt quite distant from the well-fortified glamour of the Hôtel du Cap. It is entirely seductive, especially for someone like me who had never been anywhere near the place before but had seen the Slim Aarons photographs and read about how it had inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night and heard about how it was where the Kennedys spent their summers when Joseph Kennedy was ambassador to the Court of St. James. (The patriarch carried on an affair with Marlene Dietrich here; “Papa Joe,” she called him.)

At 7 p.m., I walked up the long driveway, wearing a velvety suit I really couldn’t afford and was a little bit afraid of somehow ruining, past the honeysuckle and the cypress trees, toward the seacliff on which the hotel restaurant is perched. The co-hosts Zaslav and Carter were by the entrance, greeting the carefully selected guests. They were both dressed alike in creamy suit jackets and blue shirts. They assured me they didn’t coordinate their wardrobe. They’re an interesting pair: the man who once ran probably the most lavish magazine in a now-lost era of lavish magazines and the longtime New York–based entertainment executive best known for his reality-TV programming who is now running the most storied movie studio on the planet (as well as HBO, CNN, and more). They’ve been friends for years, they say, and Zaslav is an investor in Air Mail. The digital video invitation to this party featured retro Risko animations of Carter driving Zaslav in a vintage Mercedes convertible into the sunset.

In other words, I had lots of other questions for them, but that would have to wait until after the dinner.

In the meantime, I fueled up with some Dom Pérignon (another sponsor) and circulated. There’s a massive deck that overlooks the Mediterranean. Sunlight and celebrity suffuse the room. Occasionally, I’d spot Zaslav greeting guests like Oliver Stone. And look over there — it’s Leonardo DiCaprio with his posse: Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. Lily-Rose Depp slinks by in a sheer black minidress that evokes vintage Jane Birkin. All of the Warner bigshots are here too, of course. There’s Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdy (they run the movie studio), Channing Dungey (TV division) Casey Bloys (HBO), and Peter Safran (the DC Universe). Quick! Got an idea for a superhero movie? Now’s your chance!

“This party is so civilized,” says Daphne Guinness, sparkling in a spangly Chanel getup, her Cruella up-do towering over me. “It’s actually friends and not people being paid to sit in places. My God, I don’t know what’s happened to the world in the last ten years, but it’s really become strange.”

Soon, a squadron of Carter’s stressed-out young Air Mail staffers try ever so politely to shunt the starry crowd into the dining room to take their seats, but it’s an intimidating task.

Carter apparently loves nothing more than a seating chart and has been playing with this one all week. (Still to this day, he pores over the reservation book of the Waverly Inn, his restaurant in the West Village.) “When choosing who sits where at a dinner party, Graydon is somewhere between a royal wedding planner and Napoleon at the Battle of Borodino,” says Alessandra Stanley, his co-editor at Air Mail. “A few of us went up to his house in Opio and sat around the dining table as he judiciously plucked one red or blue or yellow tab from one table and switched it with another.”

Each table is named for a classic from the Warner Bros.’ vault. At Carter’s table (called Casablanca , as in, “round up the usual suspects”), he has placed his wife, Anna, beside the executive editor of the New York Times , Joe Kahn , who is dressed in a deep-blue velvet dinner jacket (I later spot him puffing on a cigar and grooving to Marvin Gaye). Bloys is at that table, too, and Carter is seated beside Ruthy Rogers, the British baroness who owns London’s River Café and is the widow of starchitect Richard Rogers.

Zaslav is at the Maltese Falcon table (line from the film that might apply, but probably not: “I don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble.”). He’s sitting on DiCaprio’s left. To his right is Aviv Nevo, the mysterious and well-connected venture capitalist who was a major shareholder in Time Warner.

As befits the location, there are lots of European aristos. Princess Grace of Monaco’s granddaughter is at my table — named, as if it was the kids’ table, “Harry Potter” — and I’m seated beside Scorsese’s daughter, Catherine. Carter’s daughter is here, too.

There are so many different forks and spoons in front of me I don’t really know which one to pick up first. I try not to drink too much, but it’s difficult — every time you turn around at this dinner, there’s another waiter plying you with Dom Pérignon. As the sun dips, a bluish mist descends on the Alps in the distance. A glowing yacht armada is anchored at sea. The lighting in here is so magical that DiCaprio, at the next table over from me, is beginning to look like Jack Dawson again.

There’s a lot of amusing party anxiety and status freakout at Cannes, a lot of Hollywood wannabes scrounging to get into the right rooms and on to the right carpets. It’s all a bit like a comedy of manners. I ask a player at my table about it, and he explains it this way: “Once you’re here, you know there’s no other party happening that you’d rather be at. You’re not thinking, Hmm, where will Lily-Rose be? Where will Leo be? You can rest assured you made it to the right place.”

The dinner wraps, and the party gets underway downstairs, as supermodels and movie stars arrive and spill out onto the stony terrace. Original Risko illustrations plaster the hotel walls, and classic Warner Bros. movies are being beamed onto the infinity pool that abuts the sea down below. Jack Nicholson’s face from The Shining refracts eerily onto the crystal-blue water. It stirs, and the picture changes. The ghostly faces of Bonnie and Clyde appear for a moment and then the image swirls again. Now Alex DeLarge is glugging milk at the Moloko Bar. All the while, massive klieg lights atop the hotel flash across the rocks that ring the pool.

Jeremy O. Harris is here, too, wearing a foppish black tuxedo, glass of red wine in hand and French fries wrapped in Warner Bros. and Air Mail–branded sheet paper in the other. Is this the best party he’s hit at Cannes? “So far, yes,” he says.

Before things really started swinging, I fought through the crowd to sit at a small table out on a deck with both hosts. So how did Carter, 73, and Zaslav, 63, become friends in the first place? “I taught him everything he knows; he doesn’t listen to me, but I try my best,” cracks Carter as he lights a Camel Blue cigarette and orders a minion to fetch him a glass of rosé.

They met a quarter-century ago, through the Newhouse family, owners of Condé Nast, which was the parent company of Vanity Fair . Zaslav knew them as major shareholders in Discovery.

But now Carter is running Air Mail, which he likes to describe as the “weekend edition of a nonexistent international daily newspaper.” What is it that Zaslav likes about the publication? “Graydon has great curation and taste,” he says. “This party was fabulous for me. We’re best friends, but for me it was basically, This is what Graydon does better than anyone else in the world. ”

“No,” says Carter. “David wanted to do an Oscars thing, and I said, ‘Too much pressure.’ This is fun, and this is glamorous but relaxed. The Oscars party is, like, big business.” Zaslav says that for this party, they wanted “our best friends, and our real friends, you know, no assholes. We’re coming here with our friends, and to celebrate also what Cannes is about, which is the motion-picture business, the storytelling. It’s what inspired Graydon. He’s one of the storytellers. It’s what inspired me; it’s what inspired this whole town.”

Another topic of gossip all week among the coiffed heads at Cannes is how Carter is here to outdo his successor at Vanity Fair , editor Radhika Jones, whose own party was days earlier and also at the Hôtel du Cap. Does Carter feel like he’s competing with Jones? I ask. “No, no, no,” he insists, “I’m like Al Pacino in Godfather III. I swore I’d never do this again.” Zaslav cuts in: “I pulled Graydon back in. I’m like, ‘ I need you!’ ”

They’re like a screwball comedy, these two. Or maybe Mogul Entourage. They tell me how they traveled here to the Hôtel du Cap for vacation after the pandemic. “Not just the two of us,” says Carter. “We had other guys.” “Yeah,” says Zaslav. “We had a crew of like eight. We planned it for a few months.”

Zaslav seems to know that if anybody can help him harness the glamour of the past to help him move the company into the future, it’s Carter. He is a deft evoker of various golden ages who filled his magazine’s pages with Art Deco fonts and Old Hollywood features and once made a movie (which of course debuted at Cannes) about producer Robert Evans, whose Beverly Hills home Zaslav bought to live in as he took on his current gig.

And so maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Zaslav now plans to bring Carter on to the Warner Bros. lot to redesign its commissary. “That commissary,” says Carter, “looks like a Marriott. This is fuckin’ Hollywood!” He’s working with the architect Basil Walter on the redesign and imagines red banquettes, a hotel bar, dignified lighting, and murals by the illustrator André Carrilho.

The two men’s minders and long line of well-wishers encircle our little table ever closer, tugging at them. Hold up, guys! Now that Zaslav has the big job, does he hit up Carter for advice on how to navigate Hollywood? “We talk all the time,” says Zaslav. “Hold on, let me say this,” says Carter. “David is, let me tell you — despite his success, David is literally one of the finest human beings I’ve ever met. They don’t always rise to the top, but it’s great when they do.”

But a great many people in Hollywood are currently very steamed at this fine human being. His name, his face, and his $246 million executive compensation package are plastered on picketers’ signs across Hollywood. One typical sign seen held by a well-employed television writer outside the Warner Bros. Burbank studio the other day read, “Each Day Out Here I Get Stronger, I Get Hungrier, and Studio Execs Look Tastier. Watch Me Eat David Zaslav.”

I ask Zaslav how it feels to be the target of such resentment. “Look,” he says, “it’s painful, because some of my best friends are writers and there’s no way that you can tell great stories — and this entire business is dependent on great writers and great stories — and so ultimately I’m the biggest advocate for great writers, and not only should they be paid fairly, but they should feel fully valued. And so that’s the journey, and I hope it gets settled quickly.”

And then it’s time to get back to the party. But wait — which one of these two selected the Tim Burton–era Batman and the Beatty films being beamed onto the pool? “Graydon picked everything,” says Zaslav. “Every three days, I just called Graydon.” Carter chuckles and says, “I’m like a party planner with one of those headsets, you know?”

I melt back into the star-studded scrum: Colin Jost and Scarlett Johansson, Sting and Trudie Styler, Troye Sivan, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Moses Sumney, Sam Levinson, Jason Statham, Rebel Wilson … and Boy George, whose big blue cartoon hat must’ve counted as his plus-one.

I run into Hari Nef. She tells me this is her first Cannes. She describes it as “alternately the most fun, glamorous time I’ve ever had, punctuated by moments of abject, guttural stress and dread, like people are just bringing jewelry to your hotel room and then there’s six pieces on the piece of paper they gave you and you can only find five and then you find it in a corner and then you have to get there earlier, and the dress is lost; the world is mad …”

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All That Zaz

In his 15 years running discovery,  david zaslav  was a media mogul for main street. now, with the creation of warner bros. discovery, he’s poised to become america’s king of content—and is gearing up for battle with disney and netflix.

All That Zaz JOE POMPEO NOVEMBER 2021

D avid Zaslav’s face lit up as the SUV approached the lot. It was around 8 a.m. on Tuesday, June 1, 70-something degrees and sunny in Burbank, California, where Zaslav was arriving for his first-ever visit to one of the world’s most storied entertainment studios. After Zaslav flashed his negative COVID results for the security guards, the car rolled onto the 110-acre property, an ersatz metropolis in the shadow of the Santa Monica Mountains. Zaslav gazed out the window and looked up at the iconic Warner Bros. water tower, looming over him like some ancient shrine. If reality hadn’t already sunk in, it was sinking in now. “Can you believe this?” he gushed. “It’s really happening.”

Two weeks earlier, Zaslav, the president and CEO of Discovery since 2007, had pulled off the slickest coup in the current era of megamergers—a $43 billion deal hashed out in spy-like secrecy over three months from February to May. The transaction, now inching through the regulatory gauntlet and expected to close around mid-2022, will relieve AT&T of its debt-ridden WarnerMedia portfolio, which the telecom giant had acquired just three years earlier at nearly double the price. Discovery, in turn, will amass a powerful new arsenal in the streaming wars, uniting the likes of OWN, Animal Planet, the Food Network, and HGTV with the more formidable armies of HBO, CNN, the former Turner Broadcasting networks, and the Warner Bros. library. Once the deal closes, the combined company’s revenues will be second only to Disney, and Zaslav, a wildly successful but still relatively second-tier media executive, will find himself at a table with the reigning kings of content. As a New York Times headline declared after the deal was announced on May 17: “A Titan Ascends in Media World’s Game of Thrones.”

Zaslav had flown into Burbank to introduce himself to WarnerMedia’s 27,000 employees. The vast majority of them would be tuning in via videoconference, but a hundred of Warner’s top executives were there in the flesh, their first time back since the start of the pandemic. Zaslav had brought along Discovery’s chief corporate operating officer, David Leavy, and the company’s H.R. boss, Adria Alpert Romm. Their driver deposited them at George Clooney’s former bungalow so Zaslav could prepare. The previous evening, during the plane ride, Zaslav had reflected on his history. Just like the real-life Warner brothers, he was a descendent of Polish Jews, whose grandparents fled Europe in the years before the Holocaust, when the Warners were urgently lobbying U.S. lawmakers to stop Hitler’s rise to power. In another deeply personal connection, one of Zaslav’s heroes is Steve Ross, the legendary former CEO of Warner Communications and Time Warner. In 2012, Zaslav received an award in Ross’s name from the UJA-Federation of New York. Now he was taking over Ross’s former company, about to give a presentation in the Steven J. Ross Theater. He walked onstage with Jason Kilar, the current CEO of WarnerMedia, who had been kept in the dark about the merger until right before the news broke. Zaslav isn’t the type of guy who takes notes, but today he was clutching a manila folder full of them. He wanted to get this right.

There had been a similar town hall in June 2018, when John Stankey, the veteran AT&T executive who’d originally been appointed to run WarnerMedia, appeared alongside Richard Plepler, the long-running leader of HBO. It didn’t go over well. Stankey sent a collective cringe through WarnerMedia’s creative community, rattling off jargon like “hours of engagement” and “monetize through alternate models of advertising.” A video of the conversation was leaked to the Times, and eight months later, Plepler left the company. (Stankey is now AT&T’s CEO.)

Zaslav made a much better first impression. He talked about his origins and his family. He talked about talent and storytelling. He talked about heritage and creativity. Sometimes, new bosses come in acting like they know everything. Zaslav’s message was the opposite. “We are not coming in here thinking that we know the answers,” he said. “There is a ton we don’t know.” In the words of a rank-and-file employee who was watching from home: “He nailed it.”

“He’s a reflection of his audience. He’s a regular guy. He has no grandeur about him. He connects with that, he identifies with that, and that’s why he’s successful.” —Nancy Pelosi

Toward the end of the presentation, Zaslav revealed the new company’s name, Warner Bros. Discovery, and its slogan: “the stuff that dreams are made of.” “It’s from The Maltese Falcon, which is a Warner Bros. movie,” he said. “It’s one of my favorite movies, and that line comes at the very end of the movie, when a police officer comes, and the Maltese falcon is sitting there and the police officer asks Humphrey Bogart, ‘What is that?’ And he says, ‘It’s the stuff that dreams are made of.’ And to me, this journey that we are all on together, to tell the best stories, to have our content seen everywhere in the world, the excitement of it, to get the best storytellers to be in business with us and to be delighted and excited about telling their stories and sharing them, that is a dream.”

After the town hall, an outdoor reception, and meetings with various executives, Zaslav hopped aboard an open-air van for a tour of the lot. When the van slowed to a halt in front of the fountain from Friends, Zaslav jumped off for a picture and texted it to his wife and kids. Inside the Warner Bros. museum, he strolled through Batman’s bat cave and Harry Potter’s wizarding world before stopping to pose with Wonder Woman’s lasso. Then he hit the gift shop and bought a bunch of hats, coffee mugs, and tote bags. (Zaslav’s swag stash is the stuff of legend.) Later, aboard a private jet back to New York, Zaslav and his lieutenants reclined in their seats and scoured the news coverage while an attendant poured some Chardonnay. Zaslav was still pinching himself. “How lucky are we that we get to do this, that this is our job?” he said. “I really do believe this is going to be the best media company in the world.” They raised their glasses and took a drink.

A month and a half later, Zaslav was zipping around Central Park in his signature sporty workwear: white Golf TV short-sleeve shirt, Eurosport cap, matching gray vest, and khakis. The ensemble was completed by a pair of tortoiseshell Ray Bans framing Zaslav’s square-jawed face. He usually walks the park at 5 a.m., but today he’d pushed it back to 7 for my benefit.

When Zaslav is in Manhattan, he shacks up in the Central Park West duplex that he bought from Conan O’Brien for $25 million in 2010. During the pandemic’s prevaccination phase, he laid low in his oceanfront East Hampton estate. But now he splits his time between the Hamptons, the city, and, increasingly, Beverly Hills, where Zaslav and his wife, Pam, are renovating the historic “Woodland” mansion once owned by The Godfather producer Robert Evans. The night of our meetup, he was hosting a party at Ralph Lauren’s Polo Bar to celebrate the launch of Chip and Joanna Gaines’s Magnolia Network on Discovery+, the company’s budding streaming service. But the day was young, and Zaslav likes to be on the move, so we walked—emphasis on walked, as opposed to, say, strolled—in the rapidly rising heat for more than an hour before settling into an outdoor table at Barney Greengrass, the 113-year-old Upper West Side deli and go-to smoked fish joint for New York’s media elite. (Other high-profile regulars include Zaslav’s good friends David Geffen and Allen Grubman.) Zaslav ordered a plate of scrambled eggs with lox and introduced me to the establishment’s third-generation proprietor, Gary Greengrass.

“My grandfather in Brooklyn,” Zaslav said in his New York accent ( gran -faw-thuh), “used to, on special occasions, come in and then come back with the whitefish and the nova from his grandpa.… The interesting thing about this store is, most of America is disappearing. It’s disappearing because you have Walmart, and you have Amazon, and you have these big stores. He has specialty items that are so niche. Lox, sturgeon, nova, cream knishes, matzo ball soup. He hasn’t been tipped over.” A waiter brought us the aforementioned lox and Zaslav completed his thought: “We need Main Street in America.”

Zaslav is, in many ways, the mogul of Main Street America. That’s largely a virtue of the service-y middlebrow reality programming that his networks have turned into a cultural phenomenon, whether it’s cake competitions (Food Network), pimple popping (TLC), paranormal adventures (Travel Channel), home-renovation porn (HGTV), or, as I was binge-watching in my hotel room the night before our hangout, Shark Week (Discovery Channel). Zaslav’s humble background reflects that same sensibility. Never mind that he made $37.7 million last year and pals around with more famous people than can fit in a Rolodex.

Now 61, Zaslav was born in Brooklyn to the children of dirt-poor immigrants, one of whom sold plumbing supplies out of a wheelbarrow on the Brooklyn Bridge. He came of age in middle-class Rockland County, New York, where Zaslav and his future wife worked as lifeguards together at a local summer camp. (They didn’t start dating until seven years later, following a chance encounter on the streets of Manhattan.) After a year at Cornell in the university’s tennis program, Zaslav ditched the Ivy League for state school at SUNY Binghamton. He roomed with his closest childhood friend, Perry Krichmar. (While I was chatting with Krichmar for this story, he happened to get a call from “Dave.” “When you see Dave and Pam,” Krichmar told me, “they’re the same two people they were.”) Zaslav remains close with other buddies from back home, and he flies a bunch of them to Vegas every year for a poker getaway. (One such trip included tickets to see the Eagles.) He’s a family man—a doting grandpa of two and a loving father to three ambitious millennials. (One works at CNN, one at Axios, and another is pursuing a master’s in education.) “He talks to his kids all the time,” said media investor Ken Lerer, who himself talks to Zaslav “almost every day.” Zaslav’s 89-year-old mother lives in a suburban North Jersey retirement community right up the road from me. He goes out there to visit her. He raved about my local diner and bagel shop. “When I think of him,” says Nancy Pelosi, who first met Zaslav on one of his visits to Washington after taking charge of Discovery, “I think of his audience. He’s a reflection of his audience. He’s a regular guy. He has no grandeur about him. He connects with that, he identifies with that, and that’s why he’s successful with what he does.” Or, as Steven Spielberg says: “He wears Patagonia vests. He’s not concerned with stature.”

As a media executive, Zaslav has always been lower profile than his more swaggering peers—the Bob Igers and Rupert Murdochs and Richard Pleplers of the world, or even someone like CNN chief Jeff Zucker, who is also tight with Zaslav. (After initially announcing that he would step down later this year, Zucker will now reportedly stay at WarnerMedia at least until the deal closes. Neither executive will say anything about Zucker’s plans.) Part of it has to do with Zaslav’s personality; part of it has to do with the reality that Discovery, with all due respect, is simply less consequential, even when you throw in all of its global investments, like Eurosport, which owns the Olympics rights in Europe.

But Warner Bros. Discovery has catapulted Zaslav to the upper reaches of the stratosphere. As his Hamptons buddy Joy Behar told me: “It’s like Obama or Biden said after the ACA passed: ‘This is a big fucking deal.’ Well, this is a big fucking deal for David Zaslav and for the industry.” His new rock star clout was apparent when dozens of moguls emerged from quarantine in July and returned to the mountains of Sun Valley, Idaho, for the annual Allen & Company retreat. “There was a line wherever he was,” said Oprah Winfrey, who didn’t go this year but got a scene report from Gayle King. Another big shot who was there confirmed, “It was certainly a new level of activity.”

“He wears Patagonia vests. He’s not concerned with stature. ” —Steven Spielberg

Michael Nathanson, a Wall Street analyst who is covering the merger, put it like this: “With this deal, his leadership has a much broader impact on society. He’s like a Bob Iger. The assets he will manage will have so much more of an impact on society and the public conversation than anything he’s done to this point.” Another prominent analyst, Rich Greenfield of LightShed Partners, told me, “Discovery, at the end of the day, was never gonna be a major player given its size and scale.” And now? “You move from Food Network to Game of Thrones and the DC Comics library. This is a massively different job and far more complex, but now [Warner Bros. Discovery] actually has a shot at competing globally at scale.”

In the ever-expanding streaming world, where competitors live and die by their IP, the masters of the universe are Netflix and the Disney bundle, which includes Hulu. Everything else is generally seen as being in a lesser league, although HBO Max, at least in terms of library, arguably has an edge on the other major players: Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Peacock, CBS All Access/Showtime, Paramount+, and, of course, Discovery+. Where will Warner Bros. Discovery rank once the ink dries? “I believe that this collection of brands and global content puts us in that top tier,” Zaslav told me. “My job is to make sure that we get there and we stay there. And you know, that we have all the tools. We have the full menu to reach 200 million homes.”

The mash-up is not without skepticism. Analysts have pointed to the challenge of integrating Discovery’s apples with WarnerMedia’s oranges, a process that can’t even begin until regulators finally approve the deal and the transaction closes. Discovery’s stock has been downgraded as analysts wait to learn more about Zaslav’s plans for the combined company. In the meantime, the streaming wars will only become more cutthroat. “Time is the enemy,” Zaslav said. Mergers like this are always rolled out with bullish gusto. Sometimes, despite the best intentions, they turn out to be disasters. “ ‘The stuff that dreams are made of’ is a quote from The Maltese Falcon about how the thing that seemed like a priceless treasure was actually worthless garbage that brought chaos and despair to everyone around it,” HBO’s John Oliver, who’s known to bite the hand that feeds him, joked in a June 6 segment. “Anyway, good luck with the merger, I’m sure everything’s gonna go great.” I read Zaslav a critical assessment from Richard Rushfield’s popular Hollywood newsletter, “The Ankler”: “Lots of grand pronouncements about the great brands, the commitment to storytelling, with very little hint of how they fit together or why.… So they’ve got a random cluster of things and brands of wildly varying levels of quality, appealing to wildly different audiences.… Where is the money going to come from to finance this massive storytelling expansion they are talking about? It’s the same companies you had, now saddled with the costs and debt from the acquisitions.”

Zaslav, as you might expect, sees it differently. “I see the most wonderful buffet…the broadest, most compelling offering of global content in the world, all in one place,” he said. “We need to catch Disney and Netflix, but the core advantage to this company is [that] we have a strategic plan in 2023 where we’re driving to $8 billion in free cash flow.... And so the mission of this company is going to be to spend more money on content. And the reason this deal makes sense is that we have the resources to invest in content. And we have the resources that most of our competitors don’t have because they’re investing in cable or broadband, or they’re in the retail business, or they’re in the cloud business. This is all we do, and this is who we are.”

W ith the marriage of Discovery and Warner­Media, Zaslav’s career has come full circle. He started as a corporate lawyer in the mid-1980s working for LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae, a now defunct firm that specialized in public utilities. When the firm brought in an attorney named Richard M. Berman to establish a communications practice, Zaslav threw up his hand. These days, Berman is a federal judge who was assigned to the Jeffrey Epstein case. Back then, it just so happened that two of Berman’s main clients were the Discovery Channel and Warner Cable. (He also repped MTV.) The nascent cable business was like the Wild West, and Zaslav’s part in the rodeo was to write up licensing agreements, programming agreements, and deals to buy cable systems. “He was really enthusiastic about that work,” Berman recalls. “The nature of TV was dramatically changing before your eyes.”

In 1988, as NBC was beginning to muscle into the cable arena, Zaslav wrote a letter to then CEO Bob Wright, which Zaslav described in a 2004 interview: “I said I’ve spent the last three years working with MTV and Discovery. I spent a fair amount of time with [Discovery chairman] John Hendricks going around the country trying to raise money and grow Discovery Channel. If you’re serious about…getting into the cable business, I’d love to sit down and talk to you.” Wright gave Zaslav a call and was impressed enough to offer him a job. “He said, I know a lot about the cable business, but I want to be in it in a leadership role,” Wright recalled. “He’s brash, and he backed it up in his conversation.” The two biggest partners at Zaslav’s firm tried to talk him out of it. You’re making a huge mistake, they warned, arguing that this whole cable thing wasn’t going anywhere. Torn, Zaslav sought advice from Berman, who told him to go with his gut. “I think he was destined,” Berman says.

“I think this deal will be the first sentence of my obituary. ” —David Zaslav

At the Peacock, Zaslav was a key figure in the creation of CNBC and a part of the team that launched MSNBC. He led strategic development for all of the company’s cable businesses, including USA Network, Bravo, Telemundo, and Syfy, as well as overseeing outside investments in the History Channel, A&E, National Geographic, Sundance, and TiVo. (Remember TiVo?) Zaslav took Discovery public and embarked on a hit-making expansion of its highly addictive reality programming, capitalizing on the popularity of such marathon-ready classics as Deadliest Catch , Man vs. Wild, and Meerkat Manor . Under Zaslav, Discovery brought us the Cake Boss and Honey Boo Boo, Impossible Planet and Serengeti, the Oprah Winfrey Network and Investigation Discovery (which created a show in partnership with Vanity Fair, whose owner, Advance, is one of Discovery’s largest shareholders). In 2018, in Zaslav’s last major move before the Warner deal, Discovery closed on its $14.6 billion acquisition of Scripps Networks Interactive, which is how Zaslav came to be the steward of HGTV, Food Network, Travel Channel, DIY Network, and a smattering of other properties. One of them is a news channel called TVN that is essentially the CNN of Poland. (Who knew?) Like CNN during the Trump era, TVN became a target of Poland’s far-right government. The country’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, referred to Zaslav as the “head of the opposition” on a Zoom call between the two men. “I’m not getting thrown out of Poland again if I can stop it,” Zaslav told me.

Zaslav and I were on a Zoom call of our own one morning in mid-July. He was in California that week, camped out at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He popped onscreen a little after 6:30 a.m. Pacific time. Zaslav was wearing a crisp white dress shirt, his short silver hair parted to the right. He picked up his laptop and gave me a tour of the swanky bungalow that serves as his West Coast domicile until the Woodland property is completed. It has a private pool and giant portrait of Elizabeth Taylor, who spent six of her eight honeymoons at the hotel. “It’s a great meeting place,” he said.

Zaslav, a.k.a. Zaz (or Zas), otherwise known as DZ, lives for meetings. He loves gabbing, kibitzing, schmoozing, and peppering his companions with questions. Even during the depths of quarantine, he was as much of a social creature as lockdown would allow. He worked the phones nonstop. He took physically distanced walks along the beach. He had virtual hangouts and poker games with the likes of Jimmy Buffett, John McEnroe, Tom Freston, Cheryl Hines, Suzanne Todd, and Shelli and Irving Azoff, among others. Before the pandemic, Zaslav was part of an off-the-record monthly lunch gathering hosted by The New Yorker ’s Ken Auletta at an Italian joint on the Upper East Side; Zaslav turned it into a biweekly Zoom session, and his office would send the invites. Every other Friday during the frigid winter months, he and Pam would meet up with Peggy and Richard Gelfond, the CEO of IMAX, under heat lamps outside the American Hotel in Sag Harbor. “We were like the only ones there,” Gelfond said.

Zaslav’s guy-next-door persona belies a social life that mere mortals can only dream of, exemplified by the star-studded Labor Day soirées that he and Pam had hosted until 2018. McEnroe recalled getting a last-minute invitation to dinner with Zaslav and Chuck Schumer, as well as feeling like a fish out of water at intimate gatherings with business honchos like Geffen and Barry Diller. “I think his greatest quality is bringing an eclectic mix of people together in an environment where they sort of let down their guard and enjoy themselves,” McEnroe said. Winfrey, who forged a strong bond with Zaslav through the launch of OWN, told me about the time they were wrapping up a meal when Zaslav suggested going down to SoHo House to meet Tom Freston and Bono for drinks. “Drinks led to early-morning drinks,” Winfrey recalled. “David kept saying, I’ll have what he’s having, and I kept saying, I’ll have what they’re having.” (Tequila shots.) “The guy left standing at the end of the night was Bono.”

In July 2019, the Zaslavs were on Geffen’s yacht, sailing around the Mediterranean with a crew that included Winfrey, King, and Lloyd and Laura Jacobs Blankfein. One night, they decided to screen the award-winning BBC comedy Fleabag, which was made by a production company that Discovery now owns but which Zaslav hadn’t gotten around to watching. A minute into the first episode, the group found itself in the midst of a hot and heavy sex scene. Pause! “So I put my hand up,” recalls Zaslav. “I go, whoa ! So they stop it. And I said, ‘Okay, here’s the strategy. We either shut it off, or we put it back on and everybody only looks forward. We don’t look at each other until it’s over.’ ” (They opted for the latter.)

A recurring theme in my conversations with Zaslav’s nearest and dearest was his inveterate generosity. Canceling New Year’s Eve plans to spend the night in the hospital with a sick friend and a platter of Nobu sushi. Sending you chicken soup and matzo and fresh-squeezed orange juice when you’re home in bed with pneumonia. Flying a group of his oldest friends to Rome and hooking up a private tour of the Vatican to celebrate his 50th birthday. “Some of these people had never left the country,” said Krichmar, his childhood bestie. “When it comes to his friends, the people he has been connected with for so long, nothing else matters.”

W hen the world came to a screeching halt in March 2020, Zaslav found himself in one of the most difficult moments of his career. For starters, a number of his employees were ill, including three he’d recently been in meetings with. (Zaslav dodged the bullet.) No one was hospitalized, but some were sick enough to be monitoring oxygen levels and praying they didn’t deteriorate. “In my years at the company,” Zaslav said on our walk, “we’ve been thrown out of countries, we’ve failed at a lot of stuff, we’ve whiffed, we picked ourselves up. We’ve had a lot of challenges. The toughest thing was having the employees sick and talking to their significant others or their mom. And that’s on my watch. They got sick coming into Discovery to do work.” On top of that, Zaslav, like many CEOs, had to figure out how to keep the wheels turning with everyone suddenly working from home. “A normal day, I’ll go into the office, there’s six people outside, and we’re just running through stuff. And then I’m running down the hall and grab these six people: What do you think of this idea? None of that could go on. How do you run a company?”

To stay connected with the worker bees, Zaslav started making weekly videos to send to Discovery’s 10,000 employees all over the world. Nothing fancy: Zaslav’s youngest, who was quarantining in East Hampton with Mom and Dad, simply held up an iPhone and pressed record. In the first installment, Zaslav gave a tour of his home office, which consisted of a small desk outfitted with an iMac and a conference phone. The week-four video featured a coffee table covered in classic board games and a copy of Taschen’s “SUMO-size” illustrated history of the Rolling Stones (Zaslav’s favorite band). In another, shot in Zaslav’s kitchen, he gave everyone a taste of the comfort food he’d been throwing back: nonpareils, Pop Secret, Utz pretzels, and Reddi-wip. “I may be gaining a little bit of weight,” he said.

As I was writing this article, return-to-office plans throughout the corporate world were being upended thanks to the surging delta variant. Discovery’s homecoming came with an added layer of complexity. In addition to ironing out the plans for satellite offices in 34 countries, Zaslav was preparing to welcome all of his New York-based employees to the company’s brand-new global headquarters. (With the requisite public health protocols and hybrid schedules.) Discovery’s new home, across the street from BuzzFeed and around the block from a Netflix office, is a 19th-century building in the Flatiron District with 14 floors of fully renovated loft-style space. That includes a street-level test kitchen and production studio, a wellness center, an exercise room, and a verdant rooftop terrace with views, to the northwest, of Hudson Yards, where WarnerMedia has been headquartered since 2019. It’s too early to say whether any additional real estate transactions will be required once the deal closes, but either way, Zaslav will have plenty of other integration-oriented matters to contend with. “If I were to say what is David’s greatest challenge beyond getting closed as quickly as possible,” said Greenfield, the LightShed analyst, “it’s that he’s got a team of executives at WarnerMedia who have had a gut-wrenching five years: layoffs, changes of direction, new bosses. We don’t even know who’s coming and going as part of this new merger.… There’s been no consistency of leadership. And so the biggest challenge is people and execution. That’s David’s greatest challenge on day one.”

When I ran this by Zaslav during our Zoom call, he came back to the same point he’d been emphasizing throughout our conversations. “This is a pure content company,” he said. “It’s why most of us came into this business. We didn’t come into this business to build broadband. We didn’t come into this business to sell phones or to build cloud. The people that came into this business got here because we love telling stories. We love creating content and putting it on the screen. And that’s all that we’re going to do.… So I believe that that mission and that menu of content, as we look at it all in one place, is gonna create the excitement and the energy.”

O n Tuesday, July 6, as the Allen & Company guests were pulling up one by one to the entrance of the Sun Valley Resort, Zaslav stepped out of a large SUV wearing a blue-and-white striped T-shirt and a hooded vest. Most of the arriving luminaries had simply ignored the assembled reporters, whose job was to stand around and shout questions that they knew probably wouldn’t be answered. But Zaslav obliged, which was lucky for the press, because he was the newsiest participant of the five-day gabfest, famous for its clandestine dealmaking. He stepped forward with a big smile, revealing a set of chompers fit for a Colgate commercial, and stopped for a chat with CNBC’s Julia Boorstin. At first, Zaslav rattled off a few brief and unsurprising remarks about how the media industry was primed for further consolidation. Then he uttered the four words that gave CNBC its headline: “We’re not done yet.”

It wasn’t entirely clear whether Zaslav was talking about the industry in general or Warner Bros. Discovery in particular, but no matter. Tongues were already wagging. In his industry newsletter, “What I’m Hearing,” former Hollywood Reporter editorial director Matthew Belloni speculated, “That company feels like a total placeholder to me. The Warner deal will close and either Zaslav or John Malone”—Zaslav’s mentor and the chairman of Liberty Media—“will call Aryeh”—as in Bourkoff, the banker du jour who brokered the Warner Discovery combo—“and tell him to find another deal. If it’s not ViacomCBS it’ll be NBCUniversal or Lionsgate or AMC Networks or Sony’s film and TV assets. Scale, scale, scale. Zaslav can’t think the combined company will be big enough, can he?”

Can he? I asked him before he had to jump off our Zoom for a parade of meetings with producers and agents and talent and other Hollywood folk. Is there yet another megadeal up his sleeve? Will Warner Bros. Discovery need to get bigger still?

“I think this deal will be the first sentence of my obituary,” he said, “that Discovery merged into Warner.” And the second sentence? “It soared.”

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The 2023 superyacht summer recap: Jeff Bezos is now king of the high seas

• For billionaires and their celebrity friends, warm weather means it's yacht season.
• Jeff Bezos recently debuted his $500 million megayacht Koru, which criss-crossed the Mediterranean.
• Here's a recap of some superyachts that made headlines this summer — and the famous faces spotted on them.

Jeff Bezos made headlines in 2019 for a rare appearance partying at sea on David Geffen's yacht, the Rising Sun , with ex-Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and model Karlie Kloss.

Four years later, Bezos is no longer Amazon's CEO, and he's spent the last few months earning a new title: king of the high seas. As 2023's yacht season comes to a close, it's clear that Bezos' brand new $500 million superyacht won the summer.

Many of the world's rich and famous have shied away from being spotted vacationing on yachts . Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav made that mistake early in the season, sparking backlash after hosting a lavish soiree overlooking a bevy of yachts on the French Riviera, just weeks after the Hollywood writer's strike kicked off. 

But Bezos and his superyacht guests appear undaunted by coverage of their travels.

Bezos named his megaboat Koru, after a Maori symbol of growth (perhaps a reference to being the world's largest sailing yacht at 417 feet long) and new beginnings.

Koru took its maiden voyage to Gibraltar in April, and a flurry of photographed stops followed: In May, a shirtless Bezos and his now-fiancee Lauren Sanchez — who has a striking resemblance to the sculpture on Koru's bow — took the yacht for a spin off the coast of Spain, before sailing it to the Cannes Film Festival.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Lauren Sanchez (@laurenwsanchez)

In June, Koru made its way to the Italian Riviera , where the couple posed for photos on the ship's deck. Then it stopped by the Italian island Capri, before posting up at nearby Positano, a cliffside town that's become a favorite of celebrities and travel influencers.

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There, the yacht played host to an engagement party for Bezos and Sanchez , which reportedly drew guests including Bill Gates, Whitney Wolfe Herd, Ari Emanuel, and Leonardo DiCaprio. Just a week later, the couple was seen strolling the streets of Dubrovnik, Croatia, with Orlando Bloom, Katy Perry, and Usher.

Yacht season's runner-up: billionaire Barry Diller's Eos

Another highlight of this year's yacht season was the 305 foot-long Eos, owned by billionaire Barry Diller and fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, which also had a busy summer criss-crossing the Mediterranean. 

A staple of superyacht season, Eos' 2023 summer schedule included an early stop in Mallorca , where Diller and von Furstenberg hiked with Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King; a trip to Greece where von Furstenberg visited with British Vogue editor Edward Enninful and Valentino cofounder Valentino Giancarlo Giammetti; and a stop on the Amalfi Coast where von Furstenberg snagged a picture with Kris Jenner.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Diane von Furstenberg (@therealdvf)

In August, the ship made its way to Croatia, where its owners dined with Hollywood A-listers Candice Bergen, Emma Thompson, and Jason Blum, as well as Diane Sawyer and Creative Artists Agency partner Bryan Lourd.

The Eos docked in Venice to end its summer season, where von Furstenberg hosted the annual DVF Awards — and began furnishing one of her dry-land residences.

Not too far away in Venice's harbor was Maìn, Giorgio Armani's yacht, on which he hosted guests like Sydney Sweeney and Kerry Washington as part of his One Night Only fashion event earlier this month.

Many of the world's other famous superyachts — and the folks who frequent them — appear to have largely avoided the public eye this summer. 

"In a world of long-lens constant paparazzi, there is a place for relaxed privacy that many of us take for granted," a longtime superyacht employee, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, recently told Insider.

That's likely the privacy that Geffen is enjoying on the Rising Sun, the yacht where Bezos was photographed a few summers ago — and on which Geffen infamously self-isolated in March 2020. 

While the ship has been keeping a low profile this yacht season, it's reportedly been spotted in Capri and Mallorca , though without its typical celebrity entourage on board. Most recently it made a splash in a place not typically known for attracting the world's most expensive crafts: Portland, Maine.

Watch: The rise and fall of the cruise industry

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A Party in Cannes Announces a New Hollywood Power Player

David Zaslav, who is now one of the top executives in the entertainment world, mingled with Scarlett Johansson, Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese at a lavish soiree.

By Michael M. Grynbaum

Reporting from Cap d’Antibes, France

For a few hours on Tuesday evening, David Zaslav seemed like the happiest man in the world.

“Look at this!” the 63-year-old media executive proclaimed, gesturing at the ice-blue piscine of the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, the seaside resort perched above the French Riviera with a swimming pool immortalized by Slim Aarons .

Yachts bobbed in the distance; searchlights crossed the sky. Somewhere in the crowd, Leonardo DiCaprio was wearing vegan sneakers , and Lily-Rose Depp was smoking a Cuban cigar.

Not so long ago, as the boss of middlebrow Discovery Inc., Mr. Zaslav was known as a cable TV magnate who retailed reality fare like “My 600-lb Life” and “Dr. Pimple Popper.” On the night of the party, a year after Discovery gobbled up WarnerMedia in a blockbuster deal — and put Mr. Zaslav in charge of HBO, CNN and the Warner Bros. movie studio — he was huddling with Scarlett Johansson and having dinner at a table with Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro.

Officially, the event, a social highlight of the Cannes Film Festival, was a 100th anniversary party for Warner Bros. Unofficially, it was the A-listification of Hollywood’s newest mogul.

As a relative newcomer to this rarefied milieu, Mr. Zaslav had enlisted an expert guide — his co-host for the evening, Graydon Carter , who made Vanity Fair’s Oscar party into a glittering annual event during his 25-year run as the magazine’s editor. Now Air Mail, Mr. Carter’s upscale newsletter, was making its own Cannes debut.

“I love the motion picture business, and to be here tonight at Cannes …” Mr. Zaslav said, trailing off. At one point, an illustration of himself and Mr. Carter driving a vintage Mercedes along the Riviera was projected onto the surface of the famous pool. “Here we are, two best friends, at the Hotel du Cap,” he said. “I don’t know — it doesn’t get better!”

Mr. Zaslav’s troubles were thousands of miles away. And given the chaotic state of the media and entertainment business, those troubles were considerable.

Wags on Twitter were mocking the decision to drop the “HBO” from the streaming platform HBO Max, a change that went into effect hours before the party began. CNN was facing a prolonged backlash for its town hall with former President Donald J. Trump, and the network’s ratings have occasionally dipped below those of the right-wing cable news station Newsmax.

Then there was the Hollywood writers’ strike. While other studio chiefs like Ted Sarandos of Netflix had canceled appearances and kept a low profile amid the labor strife, Mr. Zaslav forged ahead. On Sunday, before jetting to France, he gave a commencement address at Boston University, where he was booed and heckled (and then memed) by students who chanted, “Pay your writers!”

There were no picket lines in the south of France, in part because local police banned them . And the Mediterranean mood was more forgiving.

The playwright Jeremy O. Harris was among the guests at the Hotel du Cap. “I have a show with HBO,” he said, “so David is still technically my boss, even though we’re on strike.” He added that he had come to Cannes “as an actor” — he has a role in a film shown at the festival, “ The Sweet East ” — and he had “tried to treat all the work and activism I do around the writers’ strike with the same amount of fervor here.”

Like other guests, Mr. Harris said he was excited to snag one of the custom-printed ashtrays. “I’m continuing to exist in the world, while also knowing that my corner of it has a really dark thing happening,” he said.

As Mr. Zaslav bopped about in Loro Piana loafers, his co-host, Mr. Carter, watched from a remove. This was Mr. Zaslav’s second Cannes trip; Mr. Carter, 73, has been a regular here for roughly 25 years.

Air Mail has a continental flavor and a growing readership but is not yet a household name. So, late last year, Mr. Carter dusted off the Rolodex and gave a party for his venture at the Odeon restaurant in Lower Manhattan. When Mr. Zaslav approached him with the idea of hosting something on Oscar night, he countered with Cannes, where he had held an annual party for much of his Vanity Fair tenure. Adding to the intrigue: Vanity Fair, now led by the editor Radhika Jones, was planning its own Hotel du Cap bash. In an extremely haute monde sense, this was war.

On Tuesday morning at the hotel, Mr. Carter was girding for a last-minute meeting about the seating chart. Over espresso, he demurred on the notion of a rivalry with his old employer and was coy about what he’d heard about the Vanity Fair event a few days earlier. “I’m sure it was fine,” he said.

(Jeff Bezos and Mr. De Niro came to the Vanity Fair party on Saturday night, though the weather was poor. Miuccia Prada, whose namesake brand co-hosted the event, did not attend; a Prada spokeswoman said there was a scheduling conflict.)

Mr. Carter said he met Mr. Zaslav 25 years ago through mutual overlords: the Newhouse family, who are the owners of Condé Nast and also investors in Discovery Inc. (The family has a stake in Warner Bros. Discovery, too.) The men bonded in part over a shared love of Turner Classic Movies, a channel that is now part of Mr. Zaslav’s stable. And now Mr. Carter has gamely taken on the Henry Higgins role.

He helped broker Mr. Zaslav’s purchase of the Beverly Hills home of the late producer Robert Evans , coordinating with his ex-wife, Ali MacGraw (a friend). Mr. Carter said he and his longtime architect, Basil Walter, who was also at the party, are redesigning the Warner Bros. commissary in Burbank, Calif. (“I thought, this is Hollywood — it shouldn’t look like a Marriott,” Mr. Carter said.) The refurbished canteen will feature banquettes and murals reminiscent of Monkey Bar, Mr. Carter’s former Manhattan restaurant.

During the last writers’ strike, in 2008, Mr. Carter canceled Vanity Fair’s Oscar party . What about this year in Cannes? “It’s a celebration of what writers have done, so it’s not like this is antithetical to their aim,” he said, adding, “Writers aren’t paid as much as they should be.”

A few minutes later, Mr. Zaslav bounded up and gave Mr. Carter a bro hug.

“I’ve been working hard for this party,” Mr. Zaslav said with a grin, “calling Graydon every two days and asking how it’s going.”

A Baby and a Maltipoo

After alighting from luxury cars in the palm-shaded driveway of the Hotel du Cap, guests were greeted on Tuesday with hugs and handshakes from Mr. Zaslav and Mr. Carter — in nearly matching tan linen blazers. “Not intentional,” Mr. Carter said, a Pygmalion warily eyeing his pupil.

Inside, there were enough ashtrays to fill the “21” Club back when everybody smoked. Staff in black and white livery were quick to proffer lighters for those with cigarettes.

The actor John C. Reilly, in a hat and three-piece suit, took in the view. Eva Longoria and Oliver Stone crossed paths. Ms. Depp and Troye Sivan, whose HBO series “The Idol” premiered the night before, looked alert despite an after-party that went until dawn. The heiress Daphne Guinness glittered in a silver gown and her signature bicolor updo. Boy George was there in a very tall hat.

The Hotel du Cap overlaps with many of Mr. Carter’s interests: Old Hollywood, the Lost Generation and midcentury European glamour. It is the “large, proud, rose-colored hotel” in the opening lines of Fitzgerald’s “Tender is the Night” and a favored haunt of Picasso and Hemingway, Burton and Taylor, Delon and Bardot. Ms. Bardot’s stepson, the Swiss artist Rolf Sachs, who arrived in a sweeping cobalt frock, observed that the hotel had long been “part of the creation of a new bourgeoisie.”

“Graydon has the oomph to bring together a very mixed crowd,” he said.

Dinner was served on Bernardaud plates. Dessert was an extravagant candy bar called “Comme un Snickers.” Things really kicked off when a well-dressed baby arrived a few minutes past 11 p.m., its stroller carried down a curving staircase by a hotel porter. Another popular guest was Maxi, a 3-month-old caramel-colored Maltipoo, who like many of the attendees had flown in from New York.

Maxi, who was busy licking an ice cube, declined to comment, but his owner, the film producer and Venetian slipper purveyor Stuart Parr, marveled at the tablescapes. “This is made out of ceramic, not plastic,” he said, pointing out an Air Mail-branded match striker nestled between white orchids. “That tells you everything.”

Sting walked in a few minutes before midnight. Ms. Johansson arrived with her husband, Colin Jost, after the Cannes premiere of “Asteroid City,” the Wes Anderson film in which she has a key role. She chatted on the dance floor with Bryan Lourd, her agent and the co-chairman of C.A.A., and Joe Kahn, the executive editor of The New York Times. (Mr. Kahn sat with Mr. Carter and Mr. Walter at dinner.)

Mr. Zaslav may have been the co-host, but some of the guests were still getting to know him. Michael Barker, a co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, said he had met Mr. Zaslav for the first time that evening and appreciated his sense of film history. Boy George said he found Mr. Zaslav “very sweet.”

As at any industry event, some business got done. Mr. Zaslav, Mr. De Niro and Mr. DiCaprio were tossing around new titles for “Wise Guys,” a mob drama that Mr. Zaslav greenlighted after taking over Warner Bros. Boy George said he was open to any roles the Hollywood crowd might throw his way: “I’ve been talking to Rebel Wilson about playing her gay friend.”

By 2 a.m., after the disco and new wave music faded and the house lights went up, Mr. Zaslav was still working the room. He shook hands with the D.J.

The view from the slowly emptying pool deck — purple sky, dark sea, white yachts — was more or less the same one that Jack Warner, the studio’s longtime president, once enjoyed from Villa Aujourd’hui , his summer home , about 700 meters away.

Vanessa Friedman contributed reporting.

Michael M. Grynbaum is a media correspondent covering the intersection of business, culture and politics. More about Michael M. Grynbaum

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David Zaslav, Hollywood Antihero

By Clare Malone

In 1941, a couple from New York bought an undeveloped parcel of land in Beverly Hills for fourteen thousand dollars from the writer Dorothy Parker , the most fearsome wit at the Algonquin Round Table. James Pendleton, an interior designer and art dealer of Regency and Baroque pieces, and his wife, Mary Frances, who went by Dodo, craved a particular vision of California living. They imagined a landscape of eucalyptus trees and rose gardens, with a pool house suitable for high-life entertaining—a Xanadu escape from their place in Manhattan. The Pendletons enlisted the architect John Elgin Woolf, who designed homes for Cary Grant, Lillian Gish, Barbara Stanwyck, and Errol Flynn, to create a one-level house—Dodo had a bad hip—in a coolly sumptuous style that would come to be known as Hollywood Regency.

In 1967, Pendleton sold the house to Robert Evans , who, as the head of Paramount Pictures, went on to oversee a string of era-defining films: “Rosemary’s Baby,” “Love Story,” “ The Godfather ,” “ Serpico ,” “ Chinatown .” Evans led a life worthy of a film auteur’s attention—glamorous, accomplished, and more than a little sleazy. When he bought the house, which he called Woodland, he had been married twice; he would marry five more times. He became almost as well known as a host as he had been as a producer, throwing bacchanalian parties and entertaining such stars as Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, and Roman Polanski. In the nineteen-eighties, an addiction to cocaine and an association with a tawdry murder case helped bring his career, and the parties, to an end.

Evans died in 2019, at the age of eighty-nine. Three months later, a media executive named David Zaslav bought Woodland for sixteen million dollars. Though Zaslav was one of a select group of people who could afford this Hollywood palace, he was not part of the town’s aristocracy. Zaslav was then the C.E.O. of Discovery, Inc., the cable corporation whose channels included HGTV, TLC, Animal Planet, Food Network, and the Oprah Winfrey Network. At the time, his greatest claim to fame was the size of his paycheck. In 2014, he was the country’s most highly paid executive, with compensation of a hundred and fifty-six million dollars, mostly in stocks and options. Zaslav, whose teeth gleam a startling white and whose wardrobe skews toward Wall Street leisurewear—logoed golf shirts and zip vests—had a reputation as a shrewd dealmaker, adept at brokering acquisitions. Discovery was something of an entertainment-industry backwater, known for a portfolio of low-cost, lowbrow, highly profitable programs, of the kind you don’t tell co-workers you watch: “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” “Wives with Knives,” “Naked and Afraid.” Zaslav, a lifelong New Yorker, had never been involved in managing a Hollywood studio, but he seemed to like the idea of the town. “David has always been on the outside looking in on the content world,” a former Discovery executive told me. “He’s always wanted to be a player in Hollywood.”

In May, 2021, a year and a half after Zaslav purchased Woodland, he was announced as the C.E.O. of a new media company, Warner Bros. Discovery—a vast conglomerate that melded Discovery’s holdings with those of WarnerMedia, which encompassed HBO, Warner Bros.’s film and television studios, CNN, and a suite of cable channels including TNT, TBS, and Turner Classic Movies. Zaslav, the sixty-one-year-old head of a middle-market cable company, had suddenly achieved a cultural reach beyond what the likes of Robert Evans could ever have imagined. “Whoa—the minnow swallows the whale,” the former Discovery executive recalled thinking.

Under Zaslav, W.B.D. adopted a new slogan, “the stuff that dreams are made of”—an evocation of Hollywood glory borrowed from “The Maltese Falcon,” a hit for Warner Bros. in 1941. But Zaslav joined the movie business at a bracingly inglorious moment. The advent of streaming video has demolished old business models. The unions that represent the industry’s actors and writers are carrying out a bitter and prolonged strike. And the company that Zaslav has ended up leading is an ungainly entity, stuck with colossal debts.

Zaslav has said that he is focussed on the long term—a sensible position, since he’s made a pretty rough first impression. As soon as he took over W.B.D., he began slashing costs and laying off hundreds of workers. Last August, he scrapped a Scooby-Doo movie and a ninety-million-dollar Batgirl project, both nearly complete, and wrote them off for tax purposes. (W.B.D. justified the decision as “a strategic shift.”) On the picket line, actors and writers point not just at his compensation package—valued at two hundred and forty-six million dollars in 2021, the year he brokered the W.B.D. deal and extended his contract—but also at his seeming interest in playing mogul while the entertainment business implodes.

For many, Zaslav is something of an antihero, at the center of the town’s story for all the wrong reasons. Those in what one insider half-jokingly calls “the Hollywood deep state” seem unsure that he is up to the task of building a new entertainment-industry power under difficult circumstances. Even Zaslav’s supporters describe him as an outsider feeling his way along. “Notwithstanding David’s long and distinguished media career, he is a relative newcomer to the motion-picture environment,” said Alan Horn, a former president and C.O.O. of Warner Bros. and chairman of Walt Disney Studios, who has been hired as an adviser to Zaslav. “That generated a lot of scrutiny, and it can take a while to be accepted.”

The deal that created W.B.D. was, like many mergers, a marriage of convenience. A.T. & T. had bought Time Warner in 2018, as part of an attempt to expand into the entertainment industry. This was a radical departure from A.T. & T.’s traditional business, but the company was eager enough to open new markets that it was willing to pursue an eighty-five-billion-dollar acquisition and to fight off an antitrust suit from the Department of Justice. Three years later, it was equally eager to get out.

John Malone, Zaslav’s longtime patron, is widely considered a principal architect of the deal. A former cable magnate who was a powerful owner of Discovery, Malone is eighty-two years old, worth around nine billion dollars, and seen as one of the most formidable minds in business. The W.B.D. transaction, a Reverse Morris Trust, is a hallmark of his dealmaking: a complex maneuver in which a company spins off a subsidiary to its shareholders, then immediately sells it to another company, which forms a new entity in which the shareholders have majority control. A.T. & T. shareholders retained seventy-one per cent of the stock in W.B.D.; this exchange, executed by high-priced bankers and lawyers, prevented them from incurring capital-gains tax. Malone owns less than one per cent of the stock, but sits on the board and remains enormously influential. (Advance, the parent company of Condé Nast and The New Yorker , is one of the largest shareholders in W.B.D., with around eight per cent of the stock.)

Discovery didn’t really have the money to make the acquisition outright. A former media executive characterized it as a leveraged debt buyout, which is “unusual in the media business, because the media business is so volatile.” But the deal left the new company with substantial handicaps: Discovery, which was already carrying fifteen billion dollars of debt, went further in debt as it made a huge payment to A.T. & T. Thus, W.B.D. was born more than fifty-six billion dollars in the red. In order to keep his company intact, Zaslav would have to use its cash flow to pay down that debt. The former media executive told me, “The key is, in the next two to three years, can David pay off enough debt that he emerges with a viable business?”

The media industry is a seascape of big fish prowling for slightly smaller fish to eat. W.B.D.’s creation was Discovery’s bid to “scale up,” combining assets to compete with such streaming entities as Netflix and Amazon’s Prime Video, which have spent a decade enticing customers to cancel their cable subscriptions. The truism is that only the largest firms will survive in the post-cable world of streaming, which demands endless content. Traditional media companies have launched their own streaming services, but it’s been difficult for them to make scores of new movies and series while their once-reliable cash flows dwindle. Expensive cable subscriptions are quickly becoming obsolete. Advertising, too, has been lost to Big Tech, as Facebook and Google Ads have come to dominate the market.

Zaslav likes to tout W.B.D.’s vast library: “ Harry Potter ,” “ The Lord of the Rings ,” “ Superman ,” “ Batman ,” “ Friends ,” “ Game of Thrones .” (He tends not to dwell on “Dr. Pimple Popper,” a reality series about a celebrity dermatologist.) His company, he boasts, is purely focussed on content, not distracted by selling phones or cloud storage or bulk toilet paper. But anyone who runs an enterprise like CNN or HBO knows that the days of easy money from cable fees have ended. CNN made a billion dollars in profit in 2016, and is expecting to make more than eight hundred million dollars this year—a good business, but a shrinking one. The future of entertainment might have been aptly described by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, in 2016. “When we win a Golden Globe,” he said, “it helps us sell more shoes.”

Someone who has worked with Zaslav for years described his career as a series of cannily seized opportunities. Born in Brooklyn, he spent most of his childhood in suburban Rockland County, where his father was an attorney and his mother taught at a Jewish day school. Zaslav was a talented tennis player; Althea Gibson, the first Black athlete to win a Grand Slam, was his private coach. After graduating from Binghamton University and Boston University School of Law, he went to work for the New York firm of LeBoeuf, Lamb, Leiby & MacRae, where he endeared himself to partners by joining them for matches. “I wasn’t a good lawyer,” he later told Time . “But I was a good tennis player.” (Zaslav declined to speak on the record for this story.)

In 1986, the firm hired Richard Berman, a former general counsel of Warner Cable, who brought along MTV and Discovery as clients. Zaslav was quickly drawn to the work. “It wasn’t the law that I was passionate about,” he later said. “It was the cable business and the idea of building a business.” A few years later, Zaslav recalled in an interview in 2017, he happened upon a story in the trade publication Multichannel News , which said that Bob Wright, the C.E.O. of NBC, wanted to get into cable. Zaslav wrote Wright a letter saying that he wanted to be part of the project. Soon after, he was hired as a junior lawyer for what would become CNBC.

Zaslav has told the story of the letter many times, though recently it got a bit of a punch-up. In the version he delivered in a speech this spring, the article appeared not in Multichannel News but in the Hollywood Reporter , and the letter went not to Wright but to Jack Welch—the C.E.O. of NBC’s parent company and perhaps the greatest corporate celebrity of his time.

When Zaslav started at CNBC, “there were a few layers between him and Jack Welch,” a person who worked there at the time told me. The startup network operated out of Fort Lee, New Jersey, far from NBC’s Art Deco headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Eventually, Zaslav began overseeing the negotiations with regional cable companies over how much each would pay to carry CNBC. “David was a transactional guy,” the former NBC co-worker told me. “He went from deal to deal.” But Zaslav was ambitious. His deals often seemed timed to close on the night before a big meeting, and he would show up bedraggled but radiating victory.

“David always attached himself to a higher-up boss,” a colleague from his NBC years told me. A former NBC insider said, “He was very good at managing up. He knows how to get somebody to buy into him.” Many cable-company executives of the era didn’t see themselves as media moguls; they were engineers and scrappy businessmen who had built the infrastructure to bring cable TV into millions of households. Among the most powerful of them was Malone, who ran Tele-Communications Inc., based in Colorado, which at the time was the country’s largest cable company. Malone—a soft-spoken, snowy-haired man with a permanently amused smile—is the controlling shareholder of Formula 1’s parent company and one of the largest private landowners in the United States. “I have earned so much money that money doesn’t interest me,” he told Der Spiegel , in 2001. “Now it is only the love of the game that drives me.”

In a 2017 interview, Zaslav told a story of staying at the office late one night to wait for a call from Malone. When Bob Wright arrived the next morning and found him still there, Zaslav explained why he hadn’t left his post: “You said I should wait for John Malone to call, so I did.” Wright, he said, “got Jack [Welch] on the phone and goes, ‘This guy stayed all night. Can you believe this guy?’ Years later, Bob said to me, ‘That was it. We said, you’re our guy.’ ”

Zaslav considers Welch and Malone his fundamental influences. Welch was known for ferocious cost-cutting and constant attention to the bottom line—which often came with mass layoffs. Malone has a near-fetish for tax avoidance and is a master of strategizing complex transactions. “Jack was analytics and costs and ‘figure out how to manage people out and get the best people in,’ ” Zaslav said on a podcast last year. Malone “is really about long-term strategic thinking and driving toward free cash flow,” he went on. “Somehow, I think the conflation of those two is my brain.”

Welch encouraged a hard-driving corporate culture, which Zaslav strove to embody. Compact and thrumming with energy, Zaslav has a distinct New York accent, and speaks in long narratives that always resolve in a salesman-like pitch. His two primary interests, people who know him well say, are business and his family. Zaslav met his wife, Pam, in high school, and they worked together as lifeguards at a summer camp. They now have three adult children, one of whom is a producer at CNN. Zaslav’s Instagram is filled with pictures of him golfing with his sons and eating at an Italian joint with his mother, who is ninety and lives in New Jersey. “What we love most about David is how he loves his wife Pam and their beautiful family,” Chip and Joanna Gaines, the stars of HGTV’s “Fixer Upper,” wrote not long ago.

Zaslav’s gift for cultivating allies helped him advance, but it also forced him to take sides in a messy corporate conflict. In 1993, Roger Ailes , a Republican political consultant with roots in television production, came to CNBC to help boost ratings. He promoted Zaslav, who was then thirty-three, to head the affiliates division, negotiating deals with various cable companies. But Ailes was in a bitter power struggle with Tom Rogers, the head of the cable division, and he saw Zaslav as loyal to Rogers. According to Gabriel Sherman’s 2014 book, “ The Loudest Voice in the Room ,” he enlisted comrades to keep an eye on Zaslav and exhorted them, “Let’s kill the S.O.B.” In a meeting, Ailes allegedly called Zaslav “a little fucking Jew prick.”

The conflict took a toll on Zaslav. Sherman writes that an executive saw him “almost visibly shaking in an empty office.” In a memo from the time, Zaslav described a pervasive sense of fear: “I view Ailes as a very, very dangerous man. I take his threats to do physical harm to me very, very seriously. . . . I feel endangered both at work and at home.” Ailes was investigated and ultimately left CNBC, in 1996.

Zaslav and Rogers had outlasted their rival, but the episode had unexpected consequences. Ailes’s separation agreement stipulated that he could not work for such competitors as CNN and Bloomberg, but it said nothing about Rupert Murdoch’s company, News Corporation. Just weeks after leaving CNBC, Ailes held a press conference with Murdoch to announce that he would be the new leader of Fox News.

By 2004, Zaslav was the head of cable distribution and syndication for NBC Universal, a role that was distant from any programming decisions. He had attached himself to yet another boss, an executive named Randy Falco, who ran the business side of the division and was a candidate to take over the company. But Jeff Zucker, the former executive producer of the “Today” show, prevailed, and, according to the former NBC colleague, it was clear to Zaslav that he would never make C.E.O. of NBC. Though he and Zucker maintained a decades-long friendship, people who know them say that it was always tinged with competitive tension. “David kind of always coveted what Jeff was doing,” a person with knowledge of their relationship said. “He became C.E.O. of the company, and he was in charge of all the content and all the movies.”

Zaslav seemed determined to find his way into a similar position. In 2005, he joined the board of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, whose members included John Hendricks, the founder and chairman of Discovery, and Robert Miron, the chairman and C.E.O. of Advance/Newhouse Communications, which, like Malone, was an owner of Discovery. “Suddenly he got in the room with the guys who built the industry from the ground up,” one person who knew Zaslav at NBC said. “They were long-term thinkers and planners, and serious businesspeople.” Zaslav was eager to develop relationships with them. “He wasn’t particularly strong in terms of assessing and analyzing financial information,” a former cable executive said, of Zaslav. But he was “extremely good at creating bonds with key deal decision-makers.”

One well-informed industry source told me that Malone came to appreciate Zaslav’s energy and skill as an operator—someone who could execute complicated strategies on the ground. The media executive Barry Diller, who has known Malone for decades, told me, “John Malone has had a great facility for finding people that he thought were competent and giving them an enormous opportunity that would not have been available, almost at first blush.” In the summer of 2006, Zaslav began talks to take over Discovery. He was officially installed early the next year, with approval from Hendricks and Malone.

As C.E.O., Zaslav had a difficult remit: take the channel public, shake up its culture, and grow internationally. “At NBC, he was on an easy street with good compensation, not having to work very hard—he could delegate—and, all of a sudden, he had to work his ass off to turn around a group of channels that were underperforming,” the former cable executive said.

Zaslav laid off many of the company’s executives and a quarter of its staff. “There were some real turkey businesses there,” Malone said at the time. “David had to take them out behind the barn and shoot them.” Zaslav needed underlings who would help change the company. “People were coming in at nine, nine-thirty, heading out at six,” he told Time . He wanted those people gone. While some of his top executives are women, Zaslav is “swayed easily by a certain kind of person who talks a certain kind of way, and they all tend to be white men,” one former Discovery employee told me. “Very confident, big swagger. Having a bad reputation can actually be a good thing in his eyes, because it means you’re tough.” Being too nice could earn you a reproach.

Discovery had become known for earnest, carefully made educational and nature programming: Werner Herzog’s “Grizzly Man” documentary, the “Globe Trekker” travel series. Zaslav was more interested in taking advantage of the ongoing boom in reality TV. In 2007, “Jon & Kate Plus 8” premièred on TLC, opening a fruitful niche for Discovery, which then launched “17 Kids and Counting.” Zaslav showed demotic taste, and an instinct for gimmicks and provocations; in 2010, he green-lighted Sarah Palin’s reality show. “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” about a child-beauty-pageant contestant from Georgia, was followed by “Wives with Knives,” “Sex Sent Me to the E.R.,” “Naked and Afraid,” and “My Big Fat Fabulous Life.” In what seemed like a bid for more respectable life-style content, Zaslav courted Oprah Winfrey, and together they launched OWN in 2011. Television was then in what became known as its second golden age: “ The Sopranos ,” “The Wire,” “ Mad Men .” Zaslav made a point of not competing in that realm. “It’s like a kids’ soccer game—everyone saw something that worked and started chasing the ball,” he told Time . “It’s way too expensive.” Much of his programming was economical, lucrative, and relatively uncomplicated to produce. “Discovery’s model was completely different than the Hollywood content model,” the former Discovery executive told me. “It was very low-cost content that was made completely on a nonunion basis, owned one hundred per cent by Discovery.”

Malone based Zaslav’s pay mainly on the company’s performance, supplying much of it in the form of equity and stock options that vested over time. Discovery went public in 2008, and S.E.C. filings show that the following year Zaslav’s compensation was $11.7 million. A year later, it had jumped to $42.6 million. In 2014, Zaslav’s pay package was valued at $156.1 million, even as the stock fell by a quarter. “David is clearly a genius,” the former colleague from NBC said. “He’s taken probably about a billion dollars of stockholder money off the table since he started working for Malone personally.” (It’s closer to seven hundred and fifty million dollars. Still, a lot.)

Media-C.E.O. salaries have continued to grow, as the transformation of the industry requires more mergers and acquisitions, and riskier bets on unpredictable markets. But Zaslav was an outlier; even though Discovery’s stock value increased substantially in his time there, he was still the head of a mid-tier media company who in some years made more than Disney’s Bob Iger. In 2022, a firm advising institutional investors recommended that the company’s shareholders decline to reëlect three board members because of their “poor stewardship” around compensation.

For years, Zaslav lived in a tony village in Westchester County. Then, in 2010, he bought Conan O’Brien’s duplex apartment in the Majestic, an Art Deco co-op on Central Park West, for twenty-five million dollars. One person who has known Zaslav for years described the purchase as an act of self-assertion: “There’s a new player in town.” Still, a former Discovery insider who visited the Manhattan apartment said that the décor was almost shockingly modest. There were posters on the walls, and TVs playing programs from Discovery and CNBC—effectively an extension of his office.

Two years later, Zaslav spent another twenty-five million dollars on an oceanfront mansion in East Hampton, where he began hosting a “Shark Week”-themed Labor Day party. His guest lists started to appear on Page Six: Les Moonves, Harvey Weinstein, Donna Karan, Martha Stewart, Jamie Dimon, Ryan Seacrest, Colin Powell. Even Roger Ailes was spotted at a Winter Wonderland party in 2014. These days, Zaslav goes to Taylor Swift shows with Kevin Costner and John McEnroe, and sits courtside at Lakers games with Michael B. Jordan and Bill Maher. Joy Behar, a co-host of “The View,” recently accompanied him to a Bruce Springsteen concert. “He’s very social,” she said. “He’s very alpha—he has a big personality.”

Zaslav enjoys this kind of socializing but sees it as an extension of his work, the media executive Kenneth Lerer, who is a close friend of his, said. Lerer thinks that, without a high-profile job, Zaslav’s natural milieu would be a back-yard barbecue. Zaslav is often seen out in New York—at Barney Greengrass for breakfast, at Le Bilboquet or Porter House for lunch, and at the Polo Bar for drinks. But he tends not to linger. “He would have one course, a glass of wine, no dessert—because, by nine o’clock, David’s out,” the former Discovery insider said.

Zaslav rises at 4:45 A.M. to read the news, and then, when he’s in New York, walks a few miles through the city while making calls. One person sent me a photograph taken of Zaslav hustling up Madison Avenue, in jeans, a sports coat over a zip vest, and dark glasses, talking animatedly on his phone. Zaslav can call underlings as early as 6 A.M. , New York time; the conversations often last no more than a minute or two, and sometimes end so abruptly that he doesn’t bother saying goodbye. “Everyone wakes up and they got e-mails from me,” Zaslav once told CNBC. “Part of my job is to push everybody forward.” He can be similarly bluff in meetings. One associate told me that he tends to deliver long monologues and ask questions without seeming intent on hearing the answer. Another associate read the phenomenon differently: “He can be multitasking and you think he’s not paying attention, but he is.”

Some colleagues called Zaslav a short-term thinker, who moves restlessly from idea to idea. His proponents see it differently. “Of all the C.E.O.s I’ve worked with over forty years, he’s probably the most hands-on,” Lerer said. “He gets an idea and he just forces it until there’s a decision.” In that process, others note, he doesn’t always keep his temper in check. “He could be very warm and very nurturing, and then turn on a dime,” the Discovery insider said. “I saw him lash out when people bullshitted, pretending to know what they didn’t know.” An incident in 2008 became a subject of company gossip. When Leonardo DiCaprio, who was an executive producer on a Discovery series, didn’t show up to a première, Zaslav and one of the other producers had what an attendee called a “spirited conversation”—a screaming match. One of Zaslav’s sayings, according to a former employee, was “It’s not show friends . It’s show business .”

During Zaslav’s tenure at Discovery, the industry was undergoing a radical transformation. In 2013, Netflix had launched its first major original streaming series, “ House of Cards ,” and since then it had poured billions into original movies and TV series. Netflix didn’t much concern itself with profits; its strategy was to dominate the streaming sector first, in the hope that it would eventually generate huge gains. This made some media observers nervous. “One day soon, the finance gods, they’re gonna wake up and say to everybody, ‘Where’s the money?’ ” one former executive told me. Another industry insider said that “an irrational stock market” gave Netflix the incentive to overspend. “And that tipped the scales in the market and caused peak TV and then too much TV,” they said. But Wall Street valued Netflix more as a tech firm than as a media company, and its stock price continued to rise.

Though traditional media companies knew that they needed to adapt for an all-streaming future, their investors weren’t ready to take too many resources away from cable, which was still a reliable, if dwindling, source of cash. “We couldn’t turn ourselves into Netflix because the lion’s share of our network and even studio revenues came from the cable bundle,” the former Time Warner C.E.O. Jeff Bewkes told James Andrew Miller for his 2021 book, “ Tinderbox .” Like many others in the industry, John Malone thought that the only way to compete with Netflix was to join forces against it. “You have to aggregate either through coöperation or consolidation,” he said. In 2018, Discovery made its first major effort at that sort of expansion, purchasing Scripps, which owned HGTV, Food Network, and Travel Channel.

A.T. & T. saw the acquisition of Time Warner as a way to expand into a new but complementary field; the idea was that customers could stream A.T. & T.-owned content over A.T. & T. networks on an A.T. & T. platform. That deal is now viewed as a disastrous culture clash, between the Dallas-based telecom giant and the “creatives” who made up the teams at HBO, CNN, and elsewhere. The Times reported that in one early meeting, John Stankey, the C.E.O. of WarnerMedia, outlined for his new executives the protocols for communicating with him: no calls on Saturday, no PowerPoints, and as few meetings as possible. (A spokesperson for A.T. & T. disputed this characterization.)

In February, 2021, as A.T. & T. grappled with the media industry’s rapid changes, Zaslav sent a message to Stankey. “I have an idea,” he wrote, adding a couple of golfer emojis and a smiley face with sunglasses.

The two men talked for a couple of hours, and later met at a Greenwich Village town house to discuss a potential transaction. Finally, they brought in advisers and bankers to settle the details of what Zaslav’s team took to calling Project Home Run. The deal officially closed on April 8, 2022. Two weeks later, in what is now referred to as the Great Netflix Correction, the company reported a drop in subscribers for the first time since 2011; it lost roughly fifty billion dollars in value virtually overnight, and Wall Street abruptly abandoned its enthusiasm for companies that spend huge sums on content. Malone and Zaslav had closed their deal just in time.

As the merger took shape, Zaslav went on a Hollywood listening tour. Bryan Lourd and Ari Emanuel, the co-chair of the talent agency C.A.A. and the C.E.O. of the sports-and-entertainment firm Endeavor, respectively, hosted dinners with writers, actors, and executives. The deep state—the managers and agents who make the industry function—remained relatively receptive to him, hoping that he could undo the damage of A.T. & T.’s ownership. Zaslav was solicitous of the old guard. “We talked a lot about the eighties, nineties, and two-thousands, about how the business started to really change geometrically,” Michael Ovitz, the co-founder of C.A.A., told me. “He wanted a foundation, he wanted roots.” Ovitz offered Zaslav some advice: move to L.A. “When people try to run these creative businesses from the East Coast, it was very difficult to do,” he said. “You don’t get the intrinsic feeling.” Zaslav moved to L.A.

He settled into a new office, in a leafy corner of the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank—a recessed space where he works at Jack Warner’s old desk. A curving conservatory window opens on trees and a manicured garden. By the window is a sitting area where Zaslav receives guests. There, directly behind his chair, is a picture of him with Malone.

In Hollywood, Zaslav quickly adopted local habits. His Woodland house was under renovation, so he took an apartment at the Beverly Hills Hotel and spent a lot of time at its Polo Lounge. But he did not necessarily acquire the “intrinsic feeling” that Ovitz hoped he would. A well-informed source told me that Zaslav’s team fumbled through easy interactions; at one meeting, they asked painfully basic questions about residuals—long-term payments for reruns, DVD sales, and other repeat airings. Before the merger had even closed, Vanity Fair ran a lengthy piece on Zaslav, and Variety declared him “Hollywood’s New Tycoon.” The presumption that an out-of-towner was going to swoop in and fix everything rankled. There were snobbish dissections of his wardrobe and enthusiastic manner—though people were happy to attend parties in his honor and to take his money.

At the time, Jeff Zucker, Zaslav’s former boss at NBC, was running CNN. Zucker was popular with on-air talent, and the network had secured high ratings with aggressive coverage of Donald Trump ’s Administration. Much of Hollywood was similarly resistant to his Presidency. But Malone, a libertarian who had contributed two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to Trump’s Inauguration, chafed at CNN’s critical tone. During an interview in November, 2021, Malone said, “I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists—which would be unique and refreshing.” Zaslav, too, began to talk about the need for CNN to tack to the center. Two months before the deal was finalized, Zucker was forced to resign, for having an undisclosed relationship with another executive.

Zaslav did not interview any internal candidates for the new C.E.O. Instead, he quickly appointed Chris Licht, a longtime producer who had launched “Morning Joe” on MSNBC and run Stephen Colbert’s late-night show. In June, a long profile in The Atlantic portrayed Licht as a feckless and distant leader, whose ham-fisted decision-making led to such embarrassments as a televised town hall with Trump, in which the host struggled to manage the former President’s ad-hominem attacks as a sympathetic crowd cheered him on. Zaslav was portrayed as an intrusive micromanager, trying to move the network toward an ill-defined political center. According to The Atlantic , CNN employees thought that “Licht was playing for an audience of one. It didn’t matter what they thought, or what other journalists thought, or even what viewers thought. What mattered was what David Zaslav thought.” Zaslav fired Licht days after the article’s publication. He is still searching for a replacement.

A CNN insider described the network’s prospects as the merger went through: the cable business was dying, but CNN had a devoted enough following that, with time and investment, it might be able to reinvent itself. Staffers saw CNN+ as their best hope; even though its programming was somewhat limited, it might help accustom viewers to streaming news from CNN. But Zaslav killed CNN+ after just a month. Now the future of CNN itself is uncertain. Though W.B.D. vehemently denies that it is for sale, many in the newsroom speculate that it would be a prime asset to sell if Zaslav’s debt-payment plan doesn’t go as quickly as Wall Street demands. Guessing at potential CNN buyers has become a media parlor game. Comcast, the corporate parent of NBC News, is seen as a likely potential partner for W.B.D., but CNN might not survive such a deal intact. If W.B.D. and Comcast merged, they might want to offload one of their news networks. “David Zaslav will be remembered as the guy who squandered the opportunity to take the world’s best-known news brand and transition it into a digital future,” the CNN insider said. “Instead, he took the massive yearly profits that CNN has, and used it to pay down debt for this bizarre, complex, convoluted, debt-driven merger.”

But CNN is only a small part of W.B.D.’s business, and of Zaslav’s mandate. “Whenever I talk to David, the first word out of my mouth is, ‘Manage your cash,’ ” Malone said on CNBC last November. Cash generation, he added, “will ultimately be the metric that David’s success or failure will be judged on.” In fact, bonuses for W.B.D.’s top executives this year are officially tied to the company’s cash flow, along with debt reduction. “If you’re an investor, you love David Zaslav,” the former Discovery insider said. “He is a great businessman. If you put a number out, he’s going to make that number.” But, the insider added, “he’s a tractor who will run you down to get to that.”

This spring, Zaslav gave a commencement address at Boston University, where he attended law school. Wearing a red academic robe and sunglasses, he spoke dutifully of the five things he’d learned along the way. “Some people will be looking for a fight,” he warned graduates. “But don’t be the one they find it with.” Outside, the Writers Guild had assembled a picket line. A small plane circled overhead, trailing a banner that read “David Zaslav—Pay Your Writers.”

On Twitter, a writer named Annie Stamell poked at the new C.E.O.: “All we want is 2 Zaslav salaries for 11,500 WGA members, is that really so much to ask?” Two days later, Zaslav and the former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter hosted a party together at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, near Cannes, to celebrate a century of Warner films. The two were photographed in near-identical blue button-down shirts and cream-colored jackets, amid bottles of Dom Pérignon. Zaslav told a reporter for New York magazine that the party was for “our best friends, and our real friends, you know, no assholes.”

Zaslav was not alone in failing to project empathy. This July, as executives gathered for the annual media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, Bob Iger spoke in an interview about Disney’s initiative to control costs by “spending less on what we make, and making less.” This was a terrifying prospect for the creative class, but Iger dismissed the striking writers and actors: “There’s a level of expectation that they have that is just not realistic, and they are adding to a set of challenges that this business is already facing that is quite frankly very disruptive and dangerous.” Disney had recently renewed Iger’s contract through 2026, at a rate of thirty-one million dollars per year. Fran Drescher, the sharp-tongued president of SAG-AFTRA , likened him and his fellow-C.E.O.s to “land barons of a medieval time.”

For writers and actors, streaming has meant a steep drop in residual payments, which once sustained them during career dry spells or made them rich if they created a hit. SAG-AFTRA has said that it wants its members to receive two per cent of the revenue that shows generate from streaming platforms, and wage increases to keep pace with inflation. The studios had put forth a proposal they claimed would offer the union a billion dollars in increased wages and residuals. But, as the Hollywood labor writer Jonathan Handel noted , that works out “to just $30 million per year per company”—roughly a single year’s pay for Iger or Zaslav.

Twenty months after Zaslav was declared “Hollywood’s New Tycoon,” it feels as if the town has turned against him. “He’s feeling the backlash,” as the former media executive put it. He has no choice about servicing his company’s debt. But, the executive went on, “human nature would say the other objective is to prove that you are the mogul. Five years from now, you want to be remembered as someone who helped rebuild the movie business.”

Warner Bros. studios are struggling, despite the billion-dollar success of “ Barbie .” Zaslav likes to declare that the company has thirty-five to forty per cent of the world’s most valuable intellectual property—it just needs to take advantage of it. For more than a decade, Marvel’s superhero franchises have dominated the industry, while Warner’s equivalent, DC Studios, has struggled to keep up. Zaslav and his team hope to recruit the director Christopher Nolan, who made a string of successful movies before leaving Warner during A.T. & T.’s ownership. But some in the industry fear that Zaslav’s involvement in the movie business is distracting. Kenneth Lerer conceded that the hands-on instinct he sees as one of Zaslav’s strengths “does have some negatives with the Hollywood establishment, because you go to him, complain to him—he always jumps in. If David would jump in less, I think that’d be helpful to him.” A recent Variety feature on Warner Bros.’s new co-chairs, Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy, noted that Zaslav showed up at the interview and snapped a “photo of his film chiefs being interviewed, like a doting dad at an amusement park.”

The studio and the strikes are only one problem Zaslav and other executives must solve. Media C.E.O.s know that the loss of cable earnings can’t be replaced by the streaming model that Netflix and Amazon helped establish. Seventy per cent of W.B.D.’s revenue is tied up in its cable channels, while its television and movie studios account for roughly thirty per cent. Even as Zaslav works to establish himself in Hollywood, the vast majority of his cable assets are based in New York and Atlanta. He needs to squeeze them for cash while managing their demise. (A spokesperson for W.B.D. said that Zaslav wanted to devote time to his Hollywood businesses during the first year but now lives between New York and L.A.)

One of his biggest looming deals has to do with renewing TNT’s right to carry N.B.A. games. Live sports are a primary reason that consumers keep their expensive cable subscriptions, and so networks risk losing customers if they lose the contract. “It’s like heroin,” Malone once said. “You’ve gotta keep buying and buying it.” Disney and W.B.D. currently own the N.B.A. rights, but it’s likely that a streamer that wants in on the sports market will join the bidding, driving up the price. “David’s not going to want to say he lost the N.B.A.,” one close observer of the deal said. “He’s paying $1.2 billion per year right now. He will pay more than $1.2 billion to keep the N.B.A., with possibly fewer games.”

Zaslav and his team have blamed some of their difficulties on the condition of WarnerMedia. At an investor conference, Zaslav complained that some of the company’s assets had turned out to be “unexpectedly worse than we thought” before the deal closed. The former Discovery employee told me, “We knew the debt would be bad. When the number came out, we were stunned and scared.” W.B.D. went so far as to investigate whether A.T. & T. inflated the projections that underpinned WarnerMedia's value. Last summer, A.T. & T. paid W.B.D. $1.2 billion. (The spokesperson for the company said that this payment reflects a standard post-close adjustment.)

Whatever the cause, W.B.D.’s first year was rocky. Zaslav’s plan to cut costs began almost immediately and brought a stream of bitter reactions. Among other things, the company started removing little-watched shows from HBO Max, including the cult hit “Westworld.” “We don’t think anybody is subscribing because of this,” Zaslav said, of the removed programming, in November, 2022. “We can sell it nonexclusively to somebody else.” Writers, showrunners, and actors complained of a disorganized process of informing them about the future of their shows. “People who you would normally talk to have been fired, moved, or quit, so no one has any idea how to get the information they need right now,” the showrunner and animator Owen Dennis wrote on Substack. “Never cheer for a corporate merger, they help about 100 people and hurt thousands.”

Though jobs were slashed across the company, one of the biggest controversies came from Zaslav’s decision to cut the budget at Turner Classic Movies, laying off several senior executives in the process. According to the Hollywood Reporter , Bryan Lourd and Steven Spielberg warned ahead of time that the cuts would attract outrage; the film industry cherishes its own history, and particularly the history of its greatest hits. Zaslav apparently complained that outsiders were telling him how to run his business.

After the cuts were announced, Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson joined a Zoom meeting with Zaslav to plead the network’s case. Zaslav offered a concession, moving the oversight of TCM from the cable division to Warner Bros., run by the Hollywood veterans De Luca and Abdy. One TCM executive got his job back, too. The directors, seemingly pacified, released a statement: “We have each spent time talking to David, separately and together, and it’s clear that TCM and classic cinema are very important to him.”

Some saw the incident as a demonstration of Zaslav’s impetuous decision-making. Others argued that, even though Zaslav craved acceptance in Hollywood, he knew that his mandate was to save money. On the ledger, W.B.D. seems to be making progress. This year, it launched a new streaming service, Max, which mixes premium HBO content with some of Discovery’s more down-market shows. Max allows subscribers to pay less in exchange for agreeing to view ads—a model that Netflix adopted last year—and increased streaming ad revenue by a quarter in its first few months, even as subscribership dipped. W.B.D.’s latest quarterly report says that it lost three million dollars on streaming, compared with a loss of five hundred and fifty-eight million dollars in the same period last year. Though Hollywood is in crisis, W.B.D. has found a benefit to the strikes: you spend less money when you aren’t making anything. Gunnar Wiedenfels, the C.F.O., announced in August, “Should the strikes run through the end of the year, I would expect several hundred million dollars of upside to our free cash flow.” Since W.B.D. was formed, Zaslav has paid down nearly nine billion dollars in debt. Some $47.8 billion remains.

Those sympathetic to Zaslav’s project of “rationalizing” the economics of streaming think that the anger at him is unfair. “We are all little boats navigating uncharted waters,” Alan Horn, the former Warner Bros. C.O.O., said. “The issues we’re having right now in the middle of a strike are exacerbated by the fact that no one quite knows exactly how to get to a ‘new normal.’ ” By this argument, Zaslav is being blamed for an agonizing but inevitable period of adjustment. “He said, ‘Look, this company needs restructuring so that it may be as healthy as possible in the long term. That requires some short-term actions that are painful,’ ” Horn said.

Barry Diller, who spent “a great deal of the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties” at Robert Evans’s Woodland estate as the C.E.O. of Paramount Pictures, has known Zaslav since his NBC years. He’s optimistic about Zaslav’s project, if not entirely clear on what the future holds. “W.B.D. will make it through. I do believe that,” Diller said. “What comes out on the other end is, frankly, up to the gods.”

The actors and writers on the picket line are less sanguine. Even as they protest, they need Zaslav and his peers to help Hollywood make sense again: to calibrate a streaming system so they can make both art and money, if in a more modest way than they used to. But Zaslav has enough to do solving the problems of his own company.

Just last week, W.B.D. carried out another round of layoffs. And, despite incremental progress, the stock price is roughly half what it was when it started trading last year. (Netflix, meanwhile, has made a tidy recovery.) If the stock falls further, activist investors may argue that the company is worth more split into separate parts. In order to maintain the tax benefits afforded by the Reverse Morris Trust, the company can’t pursue any transactions until next April. In a few years, though, the ungainly hybrid that Malone and Zaslav built may be just a part of a new merger—another attempt to fix a problem that no one can solve. ♦

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10 Things You Didn't Know About David Zaslav

David Zaslav is the CEO of Discovery Communications, one of the biggest cable conglomerates in the world. He is also the highest paid CEO in the United States.  Before becoming a high powered CEO, Zaslav worked in entertainment law as an attorney in a prestigious New York City law firm. Excited by entertainment law, Zaslav was happy to have the opportunities to work with cable television companies which were still in their infancy stage at the time. Zaslav's negotiating expertise and vision of the future of cable television helped forge his career in the broadcast industry.   The rest, as they say, is history.

Here are 10 things you didn't know about David Zaslav.

1. He was born in Rockland County, New York

David M. Zaslav was born on January 15, 1960 in Rockland County, New York. He is the middle child with two brothers. Zaslav is Jewish and describes his family life as normal. He enjoyed sports and loved to play tennis as a child.

2. He went to college to play tennis

After graduating from high school, David Zaslav went to Cornell University to play tennis. After his Freshman year, he transferred to Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York. His older brother graduated from Binghamton and went on to Medical School. Zasav liked the mixture of educational opportunities and a fun college experience that he saw at Binghamton. He realized that he was not going to become a professional tennis player . Instead, he received a Bachelor of Science degree.

3. He was excited by entertainment law at Boston University

Zaslav decided to study law at Boston University. Although a diligent law student, during his 3 years in Boston, Zaslav had a good time. He and his graduate friends would sometimes sneak into Red Sox games at Fenway Park during the seventh inning. During his tenure in law school, Zaslav worked as a summer associate at 2 law firms in Los Angeles, California. While there, he was excited by the entertainment law the firms practiced. He also enjoyed the Entertainment Law course he took at Boston University. Later, Zaslav would teach a graduate course in cable television business as an adjunct professor at Fordham University.

4. He worked with Discovery as an attorney

With his law degree, Zaslav took a position at the prestigious New York City firm of LeBouf, Lamb, Lieby & MacRae in 1985. Soon after he started with the firm, he began working with the new partner who was the general counsel for Warner Brothers. This attorney also worked with the Discovery Channel and MTV which were struggling new cable stations at the time.

Zaslav got a bit of a break when his firm sent him to work as counsel at the Discovery Channel. Judith McHale was the attorney working with Discovery's John Hendricks to raise money to get the cable channel growing. McHale took a six month maternity leave which gave Zaslav the chance to work closely with Hendricks for six months. During that time, they travelled the country making deals and getting money to increase the channel's presence. John Hendricks had the idea to create a cable station based on education and not just entertainment. Zaslav was excited by the idea.

5. His big break was with NBC

After working with Discovery and MTV at the law firm for a few years, Zaslav happened to read an article about Bob Wright, an executive at NBC. Wright envisioned broadcast network getting into cable television as cable was rapidly growing with business, news and entertainment channels. Zaslav wrote a letter to Wright about his own visions of the future of cable television and his work with Discovery and MTV. Wright responded and, in 1989, NBC Universal hired Zaslav to help build NBC's cable operations as a lawyer for the cable division of NBC and the company's head of Cable Business Development.

Zaslav helped Wright get NBC into the cable field with the development of CNBC and MSNBC. At the time, they were competing with Headline News and CNN. They developed the Consumer News and Business News Channel which focused on business news by day and consumer news by night. The prime time program Steals and Deals was a hit. Zaslav helped NBC's cable division expand and grow. He negotiated deals with Comcast, Time Warner and Direct TV. He built partnerships like video-on-demand with Comcast.

6. His career at Discovery

David Zaslav renewed his association with the Discovery Channel (DISCA) through his work with NBC's cable division. DISCA hired Zaslav as its CEO in January 2007. Within a year, DISCA went public on the NASDAQ stock market and the stock rose 300% in value and expanded internationally.

DISCA runs 13 cable stations in the United States including Animal Planet and TLC. New programming developed under Zasav included Planet Earth, Life, Frozen Planet, and North America. The company also expanded live coverage and special programming including Discovery's "Shark Week" and Animal Planet's Super Bowl Sunday "Puppy Bowl". Zaslav also helped DISCA expand its audience of female viewers with development of TLC programming.

During his tenure with DISCA, David Zaslav has brokered important deals. Joint ventures of DISCA include unions with OWN, the cable channel of Oprah Winfrey , and Hasbro. Zaslav saw the potential of further expansion through OWN because of Winfrey's history of launching successful new talent such as Dr. Phil. As for Hasbro, Zaslav saw the potential to reach children with educationally tied programming. The goal succeeded in getting DISCA into school educational programs.

Internationally, DISCA has greatly expanded under Zaslav's reign. Currently, DISCA is present in 200 countries and territories. DISCA has brokered deals with foreign cable and broadcast companies which has helped to expand the company's international presence.

7. He's the highest paid CEO in the US

David Zaslav has a net worth of $200 million. The highest CEO in the United States, his salary in 2015 was $156,000,000. After taking over the role of CEO of DISCA in 2007, Zaslav helped the company grow. Its stock rose 300% between 2007 and 2009. Recently, Zaslav negotiated a contract that runs through 2019. The contract, which includes stocks and stock options includes a $3 million base salary with $6 million in bonuses.

8. He's a Chairman and a philanthropist

Zaslav is a member of several boards including Sirius XM Radio, Lions Gate Entertainment, National Cable and Telecommunications Assoc., The Cable Center, Grupo Telviso, and USC Shoah Foundation. He serves on the boards of the Paley Center For Media and Mount Sinai Medical Center. Zaslow's humanitarian efforts reflect his Jewish heritage. He is chairman for Auschwitz: The Past Is Present Committee. The organization promotes awareness of the Holocaust. In 2012, Zaslav was honored by the UJA Foundation of New York with the Steven J. Ross Humanitarian Award.

9. He throws the best parties

David Zaslav, or as his friends call him: Zas, throws some of the most amazing parties with the most eclectic combination of guests. He hosts parties annually in Manhattan and in East Hampshire. The guest list is a mixture of executives, news anchors, politicians and celebrities. At a recent party, guests included television executive Len Moonves, TV personality Ryan Seacrest and New York governor Andrew Cuomo. Zaslav counts among his friends, Oprah Winfrey, Lloyd Blankfein (Goldman Sachs CEO) and Colin Powel (former Secretary of State).

10. His favorite things

Married with 3 children, his kids laugh at his Sirius station choices, Bruce Springsteen and the 1970s Station. One of his favorite books is Binion's World Series of Poker by James McManus. His favorite television show (not on the Discovery network) is Saturday Night Live. He loves to play tennis and golf but is, admittedly, not as good at golf.

Written by  Garrett Parker

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David Zaslav Hates Movies And TV So Much He's Making This Change To Max

By Andrew Sanford | TV | August 31, 2023 |

“What’s that face for,” my wife asked. I was staring at my computer with my head in my hand. “They want to add a news ticker to Max,” I told her. She looked confused. I said, “Yeah, so we’ll watch, like, Succession, and a news ticker could pop up at the bottom.” “Oh,” she said, “ HBO Max.” That exchange alone should hip you to the idiocy of network executives. The brand recognition of HBO was done away with, and now David Zaslav and his cronies at WBD are set to make another brain-dead decision.

Warner Brothers Discovery recently revealed that they will add a CNN channel to Max that will run 24/7. Wolf Blitzer will be tied to a chair and intravenously fed nutrients and fluids as he reads off a teleprompter until he dies or his contract runs out (I assume). My dad, a 69-year-old man, will be psyched. He loves CNN and watches it frequently, no matter how much s*** I give him for it. However, ole Zaslav isn’t trying to snare my dad. He thinks adding CNN to Max will attract viewers 30 years his junior, because everything the man does is dumb.

I am 34-years-old. People my age don’t consume news through cable TV unless they’re trapped in a hospital waiting room. I can’t confidently tell you how Millenials depress themselves with news of the day, but I can say with some certainty that cable is not the way. Putting cable news on a streamer isn’t going to change that magically. It’s another tone-deaf, out-of-touch move by a group of tone-deaf, out-of-touch people.

It was reported recently that Zaslav and others like him are surprised that they are seen as bad guys during this strike. That alone should tell you how out of touch Zaslav is. Still, if you want to get more superficial, let’s look at how the man is dressed in the header. Here it is again for reference.

He left his home/yacht/bunker like this. David walked past all of his assistants, butlers, and human chess pieces, and no one said a thing. If anything, someone likely said, “Way to wear your sleeves out past your jacket, boss! That’s totally normal and cool!” He lives in a billionaire bubble. People aren’t telling him words like “no” or even “meh.” Wealth buys praise for the mediocre.

At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if Zaslav made Max exclusive for people’s phones. The man has a Quibi inside of him just waiting to get out. He isn’t an artist. He seems to detest artistry. Instead, he likes cold hard cash and looking like a toddler who dressed himself for the first time. Bad ideas from a man like this aren’t the exception; they’re the rule.

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Warner Bros. Discovery Town Hall Kicks Off With Oprah Winfrey; David Zaslav Says ‘The World Is Changing’

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav brought out the big guns during his address to the new company at its first global town hall for employees Thursday. The newly merged company tapped its most famous employee, Oprah Winfrey, to moderate the event and to help introduce Zaslav to Hollywood. But the get-to-know-you didn’t exactly assuage fears that layoffs and deep staff cuts are on the table, nor did it provide much context about how Zaslav plans to simultaneously transform Warner Bros. Discovery into a dominant streaming player while paying down the mountains of debt it has amassed.

“A year from now the company will look very different,” Zaslav said without offering much in the way of context. “We’ve all been through a lot of disruption… the world is changing. But this is an amazing company.”

Winfrey is a longtime supporter of the media mogul, who has championed the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN ) — a cable channel jointly owned by Warner Bros. Discovery and Harpo Studio — alongside her since its launch in 2008. The early days of OWN weren’t easy, but Zaslav helped Winfrey rally the troops and kick the Discovery brand into gear with its landmark Tyler Perry development deal in 2012.

Winfrey acknowledged that the rocky start of OWN, which Discovery took a 95% stake in back in 2020, was a blow coming after “25 years of succeeding,” which made “failing publicly” with OWN an “overwhelming” experience. Winfrey also noted that she had her own connection to the studio where she was (gently) grilling Zaslav. Her first film, “The Color Purple,” was made by Warner Bros., and the company is backing an upcoming musical version of the story, which Winfrey will produce.

Zaslav also evoked Warner Bros.’ nearly a century-long legacy. He grasped Steve Ross’ original padfolio that was gifted to him, telling employees that he plans to keep it on his desk as a way to pay homage to the history of the studio. Ross, a former Time Warner CEO, was a pioneer and innovator in the cable and video business and masterminded a merger between Warner and Time Inc.

Zaslav took employees through the company’s more recent history, a period that included a brief and tumultuous period under the control of AT&T. Zaslav recounted his initial overtures to AT&T, during which he encouraged the telecom giant to spinoff WarnerMedia and merge it with Discovery. When talks briefly stalled, he told Stankey the pair could revisit their discussion in the next six months. To which, Stankey acknowledged that AT&T burdened with debt, required a quicker turnaround. “I don’t think we have six months,” Stankey said. But where some might have seen desperation, Zaslav saw opportunity. Zaslav chalked up the successful marriage of the companies to “karma” and evoked Franklin Delano Roosevelt by noting that the new partners had a “rendezvous with destiny.”

The event was held out at the iconic Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, with employees across the globe — of which WarnerMedia and Discovery each have plenty — attending virtually. Staff in Los Angeles began making their way to the event nearly an hour before things officially started.

The studio’s newly minted owner kicked things off with a sizzle reel with a booming movie trailer-style voiceover declaring “it’s a new chapter.” Winfrey pressed Zaslav for specifics about what that next chapter could look like. What, she asked, was the “vision” for this union?

“The consumer wants easy,” Zaslav said. “Now, when you pull all of these assets together? That’s where we go…one platform that we take everywhere in the world and in every language”

But bringing the companies together comes with risks. Warner Bros. Discovery has billions in debt and Zaslav has pledged to find some $3 billion in synergies. That means that there will be layoffs, and that’s causing a lot of anxiety across the Warner Bros. empire, which also includes HBO, CNN and TNT. Winfrey acknowledged that people feel unsettled and asked Zaslav what people can expect to happen next?

“Be patient with us… we are going to focus on less layers and be more entrepreneurial,” Zaslav said. “In some areas there will be less people…”

Winfrey pressed Zaslav on how he planned to make decisions about those cuts.

“There’s a process and a team from both sides who has been working hard on these plans,” Zaslav said. “In the area where Warner and Discovery have largely different business (i.e. sports, movies) there will be less change.”

Staffers in the room interpreted Zaslav’s remarks to mean that much of the pink-slipping will happen at the cable networks where there is the most overlap between what Discovery does and what Turner and others have historically focused on.

Zaslav is taking the helm as the media business is being upended by new players such as Netflix and Disney, who are laser-focused on streaming, as well as tech giants such as Amazon and Apple who are investing heavily in the content space. Getting bigger is seen as essential to survive.

“We need to lay out ‘what is winning?'” Zaslav said.

The new media mogul pointed to CNN as one of the recent winners, citing its on-the-ground coverage of the war in Ukraine as something that left it ahead of the cable news pack.

Zaslav did give a hint about the type of programming he intends to push, saying that “sports is a big part of our future.” He also told staff that he had been talking to HBO/HBO Max Chief Content Officer Casey Bloys about making the streamer “a sports destination.”

On Monday, the first day Warner Bros. Discovery begins trading on the Nasdaq under the “WBD” ticker, Zaslav visited Hudson Yards for a series of informal meet-and-greets with WarnerMedia employees before heading to Washington, D.C., for a meeting with senior executives and CNN anchors at roughly 6 p.m. On Tuesday, Zaslav went to the company’s Atlanta headquarters.

Some staffers felt that the presentation on Thursday dwelled too much on the past and didn’t provide enough concrete information about how the integration would unfold. Others, however, believed that Winfrey helped personalize Zaslav, getting the mogul to open up about his children, his marriage and his values. At times, the event played less like a corporate event and more like an episode of Winfrey’s talk show, with the host quizzing Zaslav on how he managed to “get it all done” and asking him what movie made him cry recently. The answer to that last query was “CODA,” a film it should be noted that was distributed not by Warner Bros., but by Apple, one of the tech players causing headaches for traditional media companies.

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David Zaslav Hints At Potential Reunion With Ex-CNN Boss Chris Licht, Reflects On Jeff Zucker Exit And Reaffirms Plan To Avoid Making It An “Advocacy Network”

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Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav gave former CNN chief Chris Licht a warm endorsement, even hinting at the possibility that the TV news vet could work again with the company.

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“Chris is a good friend,” Zaslav said. As to their parting ways, he added, “That was … look, there are a lot of good days and a lot of tough days. Chris has had a lot of great days. He created Morning Joe . He created CBS This Morning . We had a lot of fun and a lot of battles together. Chris is going to have a lot of great chapters and hopefully some of those with us at Warner Bros. He’s very talented.”

Moderator Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Zaslav about the state of his relationship with Jeff Zucker, who had been a close friend for many years until his departure as head of CNN in February 2022. Zucker left due to a consensual relationship with colleague Allison Gollust, which had been widely known by staffers. Zucker’s exit caused unrest among CNN talent and staff and even prompted a threat of legal action by Zucker , as Deadline reported at the time.

“It appears that that relationship fractured,” Sorkin said. “I wouldn’t say it fractured,” Zaslav replied. “In the end, I believe that you want to foster friendships, but you have to make the decision that’s the best for the business. And if you have a best friend and they have a great script, if the Warner Bros. team doesn’t think that’s the best storytelling vehicle that we should go with, you have to put the friendships aside.”

“You know who your friends are,” Zaslav said. “And you’re also friend- ly with a lot of people. But you can’t mix the two. And sometimes, when you make a business decision, or sometimes when a business decision is made by your team, your friends can take it personally. They can feel that you should have interceded. And sometimes, you know, it’s unfortunate. And it is emotional. It’s emotional for me. I’d like to always say yes to my friends.”

Mark Thompson, who took over CNN last summer after executive runs at the New York Times Co. and the BBC, got praise from Zaslav at the end of the half-hour session. “Exceptional leader. Ground-up leader,” Zaslav said. “He’s won the hearts and minds of the team.”

Sorkin inquired about the current political orientation of CNN, which has been under scrutiny since WBD board member and Zaslav mentor John Malone decried its left-leaning approach under Zucker.

Zaslav said the company has sought to address the “strategic question of, ‘Should news networks be advocacy networks, or should news networks be journalistic organizations?’ And it’s really a strategic choice, nothing good or bad. For CNN, the choice was, this should be — it is — the greatest journalistic organization in the world.”

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Cruising the Moskva River: A short guide to boat trips in Russia’s capital

There’s hardly a better way to absorb Moscow’s atmosphere than on a ship sailing up and down the Moskva River. While complicated ticketing, loud music and chilling winds might dampen the anticipated fun, this checklist will help you to enjoy the scenic views and not fall into common tourist traps.

How to find the right boat?

There are plenty of boats and selecting the right one might be challenging. The size of the boat should be your main criteria.

Plenty of small boats cruise the Moskva River, and the most vivid one is this yellow Lay’s-branded boat. Everyone who has ever visited Moscow probably has seen it.

This option might leave a passenger disembarking partially deaf as the merciless Russian pop music blasts onboard. A free spirit, however, will find partying on such a vessel to be an unforgettable and authentic experience that’s almost a metaphor for life in modern Russia: too loud, and sometimes too welcoming. Tickets start at $13 (800 rubles) per person.

Bigger boats offer smoother sailing and tend to attract foreign visitors because of their distinct Soviet aura. Indeed, many of the older vessels must have seen better days. They are still afloat, however, and getting aboard is a unique ‘cultural’ experience. Sometimes the crew might offer lunch or dinner to passengers, but this option must be purchased with the ticket. Here is one such  option  offering dinner for $24 (1,490 rubles).

If you want to travel in style, consider Flotilla Radisson. These large, modern vessels are quite posh, with a cozy restaurant and an attentive crew at your service. Even though the selection of wines and food is modest, these vessels are still much better than other boats.

Surprisingly, the luxurious boats are priced rather modestly, and a single ticket goes for $17-$32 (1,100-2,000 rubles); also expect a reasonable restaurant bill on top.

How to buy tickets?

Women holding photos of ships promise huge discounts to “the young and beautiful,” and give personal invitations for river tours. They sound and look nice, but there’s a small catch: their ticket prices are usually more than those purchased online.

“We bought tickets from street hawkers for 900 rubles each, only to later discover that the other passengers bought their tickets twice as cheap!”  wrote  (in Russian) a disappointed Rostislav on a travel company website.

Nevertheless, buying from street hawkers has one considerable advantage: they personally escort you to the vessel so that you don’t waste time looking for the boat on your own.

Prices start at $13 (800 rubles) for one ride, and for an additional $6.5 (400 rubles) you can purchase an unlimited number of tours on the same boat on any given day.

Flotilla Radisson has official ticket offices at Gorky Park and Hotel Ukraine, but they’re often sold out.

Buying online is an option that might save some cash. Websites such as  this   offer considerable discounts for tickets sold online. On a busy Friday night an online purchase might be the only chance to get a ticket on a Flotilla Radisson boat.

This  website  (in Russian) offers multiple options for short river cruises in and around the city center, including offbeat options such as ‘disco cruises’ and ‘children cruises.’ This other  website  sells tickets online, but doesn’t have an English version. The interface is intuitive, however.

Buying tickets online has its bad points, however. The most common is confusing which pier you should go to and missing your river tour.

“I once bought tickets online to save with the discount that the website offered,” said Igor Shvarkin from Moscow. “The pier was initially marked as ‘Park Kultury,’ but when I arrived it wasn’t easy to find my boat because there were too many there. My guests had to walk a considerable distance before I finally found the vessel that accepted my tickets purchased online,” said the man.

There are two main boarding piers in the city center:  Hotel Ukraine  and  Park Kultury . Always take note of your particular berth when buying tickets online.

Where to sit onboard?

Even on a warm day, the headwind might be chilly for passengers on deck. Make sure you have warm clothes, or that the crew has blankets ready upon request.

The glass-encased hold makes the tour much more comfortable, but not at the expense of having an enjoyable experience.

Getting off the boat requires preparation as well. Ideally, you should be able to disembark on any pier along the way. In reality, passengers never know where the boat’s captain will make the next stop. Street hawkers often tell passengers in advance where they’ll be able to disembark. If you buy tickets online then you’ll have to research it yourself.

There’s a chance that the captain won’t make any stops at all and will take you back to where the tour began, which is the case with Flotilla Radisson. The safest option is to automatically expect that you’ll return to the pier where you started.

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All That Zaz: With Warner Bros. Discovery Merger, David Zaslav Is Angling to Become America’s King of Content

By Joe Pompeo

David Zaslav’s face lit up as the SUV approached the lot. It was around 8 a.m. on Tuesday, June 1, 70-something degrees and sunny in Burbank, California, where Zaslav was arriving for his first-ever visit to one of the world’s most storied entertainment studios. After Zaslav flashed his negative COVID results for the security guards, the car rolled onto the 110-acre property, an ersatz metropolis in the shadow of the Santa Monica Mountains. Zaslav gazed out the window and looked up at the iconic Warner Bros. water tower, looming over him like some ancient shrine. If reality hadn’t already sunk in, it was sinking in now. “Can you believe this?” he gushed. “It’s really happening.”

Two weeks earlier, Zaslav, the president and CEO of Discovery since 2007, had pulled off the slickest coup in the current era of megamergers—a $43 billion deal hashed out in spy-like secrecy over three months from February to May. The transaction, now inching through the regulatory gauntlet and expected to close around mid-2022, will relieve AT&T of its debt-ridden WarnerMedia portfolio, which the telecom giant had acquired just three years earlier at nearly double the price. Discovery, in turn, will amass a powerful new arsenal in the streaming wars, uniting the likes of OWN, Animal Planet, the Food Network, and HGTV with the more formidable armies of HBO, CNN, the former Turner Broadcasting networks, and the Warner Bros. library. Once the deal closes, the combined company’s revenues will be second only to Disney, and Zaslav, a wildly successful but still relatively second-tier media executive, will find himself at a table with the reigning kings of content. As a New York Times headline declared after the deal was announced on May 17: “A Titan Ascends in Media World’s Game of Thrones.”

Zaslav had flown into Burbank to introduce himself to WarnerMedia’s 27,000 employees. The vast majority of them would be tuning in via videoconference, but a hundred of Warner’s top executives were there in the flesh, their first time back since the start of the pandemic. Zaslav had brought along Discovery’s chief corporate operating officer, David Leavy, and the company’s H.R. boss, Adria Alpert Romm. Their driver deposited them at George Clooney’s former bungalow so Zaslav could prepare. The previous evening, during the plane ride, Zaslav had reflected on his history. Just like the real-life Warner brothers, he was a descendent of Polish Jews, whose grandparents fled Europe in the years before the Holocaust, when the Warners were urgently lobbying U.S. lawmakers to stop Hitler’s rise to power. In another deeply personal connection, one of Zaslav’s heroes is Steve Ross, the legendary former CEO of Warner Communications and Time Warner. In 2012, Zaslav received an award in Ross’s name from the UJA-Federation of New York. Now he was taking over Ross’s former company, about to give a presentation in the Steven J. Ross Theater. He walked onstage with Jason Kilar, the current CEO of WarnerMedia, who had been kept in the dark about the merger until right before the news broke. Zaslav isn’t the type of guy who takes notes, but today he was clutching a manila folder full of them. He wanted to get this right.

There had been a similar town hall in June 2018, when John Stankey, the veteran AT&T executive who’d originally been appointed to run WarnerMedia, appeared alongside Richard Plepler, the long-running leader of HBO. It didn’t go over well. Stankey sent a collective cringe through WarnerMedia’s creative community, rattling off jargon like “hours of engagement” and “monetize through alternate models of advertising.” A video of the conversation was leaked to the Times, and eight months later, Plepler left the company. (Stankey is now AT&T’s CEO.)

Zaslav made a much better first impression. He talked about his origins and his family. He talked about talent and storytelling. He talked about heritage and creativity. Sometimes, new bosses come in acting like they know everything. Zaslav’s message was the opposite. “We are not coming in here thinking that we know the answers,” he said. “There is a ton we don’t know.” In the words of a rank-and-file employee who was watching from home: “He nailed it.”

Toward the end of the presentation, Zaslav revealed the new company’s name, Warner Bros. Discovery, and its slogan: “the stuff that dreams are made of.” “It’s from The Maltese Falcon, which is a Warner Bros. movie,” he said. “It’s one of my favorite movies, and that line comes at the very end of the movie, when a police officer comes, and the Maltese falcon is sitting there and the police officer asks Humphrey Bogart, ‘What is that?’ And he says, ‘It’s the stuff that dreams are made of.’ And to me, this journey that we are all on together, to tell the best stories, to have our content seen everywhere in the world, the excitement of it, to get the best storytellers to be in business with us and to be delighted and excited about telling their stories and sharing them, that is a dream.”

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After the town hall, an outdoor reception, and meetings with various executives, Zaslav hopped aboard an open-air van for a tour of the lot. When the van slowed to a halt in front of the fountain from Friends, Zaslav jumped off for a picture and texted it to his wife and kids. Inside the Warner Bros. museum, he strolled through Batman’s bat cave and Harry Potter’s wizarding world before stopping to pose with Wonder Woman’s lasso. Then he hit the gift shop and bought a bunch of hats, coffee mugs, and tote bags. (Zaslav’s swag stash is the stuff of legend.) Later, aboard a private jet back to New York, Zaslav and his lieutenants reclined in their seats and scoured the news coverage while an attendant poured some Chardonnay. Zaslav was still pinching himself. “How lucky are we that we get to do this, that this is our job?” he said. “I really do believe this is going to be the best media company in the world.” They raised their glasses and took a drink.

A month and a half later, Zaslav was zipping around Central Park in his signature sporty workwear: white Golf TV short-sleeve shirt, Eurosport cap, matching gray vest, and khakis. The ensemble was completed by a pair of tortoiseshell Ray Bans framing Zaslav’s square-jawed face. He usually walks the park at 5 a.m., but today he’d pushed it back to 7 for my benefit.

When Zaslav is in Manhattan, he shacks up in the Central Park West duplex that he bought from Conan O’Brien for $25 million in 2010. During the pandemic’s prevaccination phase, he laid low in his oceanfront East Hampton estate. But now he splits his time between the Hamptons, the city, and, increasingly, Beverly Hills, where Zaslav and his wife, Pam, are renovating the historic “Woodland” mansion once owned by The Godfather producer Robert Evans. The night of our meetup, he was hosting a party at Ralph Lauren’s Polo Bar to celebrate the launch of Chip and Joanna Gaines’s Magnolia Network on Discovery+, the company’s budding streaming service. But the day was young, and Zaslav likes to be on the move, so we walked—emphasis on walked, as opposed to, say, strolled—in the rapidly rising heat for more than an hour before settling into an outdoor table at Barney Greengrass, the 113-year-old Upper West Side deli and go-to smoked fish joint for New York’s media elite. (Other high-profile regulars include Zaslav’s good friends David Geffen and Allen Grubman.) Zaslav ordered a plate of scrambled eggs with lox and introduced me to the establishment’s third-generation proprietor, Gary Greengrass.

“My grandfather in Brooklyn,” Zaslav said in his New York accent ( gran -faw-thuh), “used to, on special occasions, come in and then come back with the whitefish and the nova from his grandpa.… The interesting thing about this store is, most of America is disappearing. It’s disappearing because you have Walmart, and you have Amazon, and you have these big stores. He has specialty items that are so niche. Lox, sturgeon, nova, cream knishes, matzo ball soup. He hasn’t been tipped over.” A waiter brought us the aforementioned lox and Zaslav completed his thought: “We need Main Street in America.”

Zaslav is, in many ways, the mogul of Main Street America. That’s largely a virtue of the service-y middlebrow reality programming that his networks have turned into a cultural phenomenon, whether it’s cake competitions (Food Network), pimple popping (TLC), paranormal adventures (Travel Channel), home-renovation porn (HGTV), or, as I was binge-watching in my hotel room the night before our hangout, Shark Week (Discovery Channel). Zaslav’s humble background reflects that same sensibility. Never mind that he made $37.7 million last year and pals around with more famous people than can fit in a Rolodex.

Now 61, Zaslav was born in Brooklyn to the children of dirt-poor immigrants, one of whom sold plumbing supplies out of a wheelbarrow on the Brooklyn Bridge. He came of age in middle-class Rockland County, New York, where Zaslav and his future wife worked as lifeguards together at a local summer camp. (They didn’t start dating until seven years later, following a chance encounter on the streets of Manhattan.) After a year at Cornell in the university’s tennis program, Zaslav ditched the Ivy League for state school at SUNY Binghamton. He roomed with his closest childhood friend, Perry Krichmar. (While I was chatting with Krichmar for this story, he happened to get a call from “Dave.” “When you see Dave and Pam,” Krichmar told me, “they’re the same two people they were.”) Zaslav remains close with other buddies from back home, and he flies a bunch of them to Vegas every year for a poker getaway. (One such trip included tickets to see the Eagles.) He’s a family man—a doting grandpa of two and a loving father to three ambitious millennials. (One works at CNN, one at Axios, and another is pursuing a master’s in education.) “He talks to his kids all the time,” said media investor Ken Lerer, who himself talks to Zaslav “almost every day.” Zaslav’s 89-year-old mother lives in a suburban North Jersey retirement community right up the road from me. He goes out there to visit her. He raved about my local diner and bagel shop. “When I think of him,” says Nancy Pelosi, who first met Zaslav on one of his visits to Washington after taking charge of Discovery, “I think of his audience. He’s a reflection of his audience. He’s a regular guy. He has no grandeur about him. He connects with that, he identifies with that, and that’s why he’s successful with what he does.” Or, as Steven Spielberg says: “He wears Patagonia vests. He’s not concerned with stature.”

As a media executive, Zaslav has always been lower profile than his more swaggering peers—the Bob Igers and Rupert Murdochs and Richard Pleplers of the world, or even someone like CNN chief Jeff Zucker, who is also tight with Zaslav. (After initially announcing that he would step down later this year, Zucker will now reportedly stay at WarnerMedia at least until the deal closes. Neither executive will say anything about Zucker’s plans.) Part of it has to do with Zaslav’s personality; part of it has to do with the reality that Discovery, with all due respect, is simply less consequential, even when you throw in all of its global investments, like Eurosport, which owns the Olympics rights in Europe.

But Warner Bros. Discovery has catapulted Zaslav to the upper reaches of the stratosphere. As his Hamptons buddy Joy Behar told me: “It’s like Obama or Biden said after the ACA passed: ‘This is a big fucking deal.’ Well, this is a big fucking deal for David Zaslav and for the industry.” His new rock star clout was apparent when dozens of moguls emerged from quarantine in July and returned to the mountains of Sun Valley, Idaho, for the annual Allen & Company retreat. “There was a line wherever he was,” said Oprah Winfrey, who didn’t go this year but got a scene report from Gayle King. Another big shot who was there confirmed, “It was certainly a new level of activity.”

Michael Nathanson, a Wall Street analyst who is covering the merger, put it like this: “With this deal, his leadership has a much broader impact on society. He’s like a Bob Iger. The assets he will manage will have so much more of an impact on society and the public conversation than anything he’s done to this point.” Another prominent analyst, Rich Greenfield of LightShed Partners, told me, “Discovery, at the end of the day, was never gonna be a major player given its size and scale.” And now? “You move from Food Network to Game of Thrones and the DC Comics library. This is a massively different job and far more complex, but now [Warner Bros. Discovery] actually has a shot at competing globally at scale.”

In the ever-expanding streaming world, where competitors live and die by their IP, the masters of the universe are Netflix and the Disney bundle, which includes Hulu. Everything else is generally seen as being in a lesser league, although HBO Max, at least in terms of library, arguably has an edge on the other major players: Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Peacock, CBS All Access/Showtime, Paramount+, and, of course, Discovery+. Where will Warner Bros. Discovery rank once the ink dries? “I believe that this collection of brands and global content puts us in that top tier,” Zaslav told me. “My job is to make sure that we get there and we stay there. And you know, that we have all the tools. We have the full menu to reach 200 million homes.”

The mash-up is not without skepticism. Analysts have pointed to the challenge of integrating Discovery’s apples with WarnerMedia’s oranges, a process that can’t even begin until regulators finally approve the deal and the transaction closes. Discovery’s stock has been downgraded as analysts wait to learn more about Zaslav’s plans for the combined company. In the meantime, the streaming wars will only become more cutthroat. “Time is the enemy,” Zaslav said. Mergers like this are always rolled out with bullish gusto. Sometimes, despite the best intentions, they turn out to be disasters. “ ‘The stuff that dreams are made of’ is a quote from The Maltese Falcon about how the thing that seemed like a priceless treasure was actually worthless garbage that brought chaos and despair to everyone around it,” HBO’s John Oliver, who’s known to bite the hand that feeds him, joked in a June 6 segment. “Anyway, good luck with the merger, I’m sure everything’s gonna go great.” I read Zaslav a critical assessment from Richard Rushfield’s popular Hollywood newsletter, “The Ankler”: “Lots of grand pronouncements about the great brands, the commitment to storytelling, with very little hint of how they fit together or why.… So they’ve got a random cluster of things and brands of wildly varying levels of quality, appealing to wildly different audiences.… Where is the money going to come from to finance this massive storytelling expansion they are talking about? It’s the same companies you had, now saddled with the costs and debt from the acquisitions.”

Zaslav, as you might expect, sees it differently. “I see the most wonderful buffet…the broadest, most compelling offering of global content in the world, all in one place,” he said. “We need to catch Disney and Netflix, but the core advantage to this company is [that] we have a strategic plan in 2023 where we’re driving to $8 billion in free cash flow.... And so the mission of this company is going to be to spend more money on content. And the reason this deal makes sense is that we have the resources to invest in content. And we have the resources that most of our competitors don’t have because they’re investing in cable or broadband, or they’re in the retail business, or they’re in the cloud business. This is all we do, and this is who we are.”

With the marriage of Discovery and Warner­Media, Zaslav’s career has come full circle. He started as a corporate lawyer in the mid-1980s working for LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae, a now defunct firm that specialized in public utilities. When the firm brought in an attorney named Richard M. Berman to establish a communications practice, Zaslav threw up his hand. These days, Berman is a federal judge who was assigned to the Jeffrey Epstein case. Back then, it just so happened that two of Berman’s main clients were the Discovery Channel and Warner Cable. (He also repped MTV.) The nascent cable business was like the Wild West, and Zaslav’s part in the rodeo was to write up licensing agreements, programming agreements, and deals to buy cable systems. “He was really enthusiastic about that work,” Berman recalls. “The nature of TV was dramatically changing before your eyes.”

In 1988, as NBC was beginning to muscle into the cable arena, Zaslav wrote a letter to then CEO Bob Wright, which Zaslav described in a 2004 interview: “I said I’ve spent the last three years working with MTV and Discovery. I spent a fair amount of time with [Discovery chairman] John Hendricks going around the country trying to raise money and grow Discovery Channel. If you’re serious about…getting into the cable business, I’d love to sit down and talk to you.” Wright gave Zaslav a call and was impressed enough to offer him a job. “He said, I know a lot about the cable business, but I want to be in it in a leadership role,” Wright recalled. “He’s brash, and he backed it up in his conversation.” The two biggest partners at Zaslav’s firm tried to talk him out of it. You’re making a huge mistake, they warned, arguing that this whole cable thing wasn’t going anywhere. Torn, Zaslav sought advice from Berman, who told him to go with his gut. “I think he was destined,” Berman says.

At the Peacock, Zaslav was a key figure in the creation of CNBC and a part of the team that launched MSNBC. He led strategic development for all of the company’s cable businesses, including USA Network, Bravo, Telemundo, and Syfy, as well as overseeing outside investments in the History Channel, A&E, National Geographic, Sundance, and TiVo. (Remember TiVo?) Zaslav took Discovery public and embarked on a hit-making expansion of its highly addictive reality programming, capitalizing on the popularity of such marathon-ready classics as Deadliest Catch , Man vs. Wild, and Meerkat Manor . Under Zaslav, Discovery brought us the Cake Boss and Honey Boo Boo, Impossible Planet and Serengeti, the Oprah Winfrey Network and Investigation Discovery (which created a show in partnership with Vanity Fair, whose owner, Advance, is one of Discovery’s largest shareholders). In 2018, in Zaslav’s last major move before the Warner deal, Discovery closed on its $14.6 billion acquisition of Scripps Networks Interactive, which is how Zaslav came to be the steward of HGTV, Food Network, Travel Channel, DIY Network, and a smattering of other properties. One of them is a news channel called TVN that is essentially the CNN of Poland. (Who knew?) Like CNN during the Trump era, TVN became a target of Poland’s far-right government. The country’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, referred to Zaslav as the “head of the opposition” on a Zoom call between the two men. “I’m not getting thrown out of Poland again if I can stop it,” Zaslav told me.

Zaslav and I were on a Zoom call of our own one morning in mid-July. He was in California that week, camped out at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He popped onscreen a little after 6:30 a.m. Pacific time. Zaslav was wearing a crisp white dress shirt, his short silver hair parted to the right. He picked up his laptop and gave me a tour of the swanky bungalow that serves as his West Coast domicile until the Woodland property is completed. It has a private pool and giant portrait of Elizabeth Taylor, who spent six of her eight honeymoons at the hotel. “It’s a great meeting place,” he said.

Zaslav, a.k.a. Zaz (or Zas), otherwise known as DZ, lives for meetings. He loves gabbing, kibitzing, schmoozing, and peppering his companions with questions. Even during the depths of quarantine, he was as much of a social creature as lockdown would allow. He worked the phones nonstop. He took physically distanced walks along the beach. He had virtual hangouts and poker games with the likes of Jimmy Buffett, John McEnroe, Tom Freston, Cheryl Hines, Suzanne Todd, and Shelli and Irving Azoff, among others. Before the pandemic, Zaslav was part of an off-the-record monthly lunch gathering hosted by The New Yorker ’s Ken Auletta at an Italian joint on the Upper East Side; Zaslav turned it into a biweekly Zoom session, and his office would send the invites. Every other Friday during the frigid winter months, he and Pam would meet up with Peggy and Richard Gelfond, the CEO of IMAX, under heat lamps outside the American Hotel in Sag Harbor. “We were like the only ones there,” Gelfond said.

Zaslav’s guy-next-door persona belies a social life that mere mortals can only dream of, exemplified by the star-studded Labor Day soirées that he and Pam had hosted until 2018. McEnroe recalled getting a last-minute invitation to dinner with Zaslav and Chuck Schumer, as well as feeling like a fish out of water at intimate gatherings with business honchos like Geffen and Barry Diller. “I think his greatest quality is bringing an eclectic mix of people together in an environment where they sort of let down their guard and enjoy themselves,” McEnroe said. Winfrey, who forged a strong bond with Zaslav through the launch of OWN, told me about the time they were wrapping up a meal when Zaslav suggested going down to SoHo House to meet Tom Freston and Bono for drinks. “Drinks led to early-morning drinks,” Winfrey recalled. “David kept saying, I’ll have what he’s having, and I kept saying, I’ll have what they’re having.” (Tequila shots.) “The guy left standing at the end of the night was Bono.”

In July 2019, the Zaslavs were on Geffen’s yacht, sailing around the Mediterranean with a crew that included Winfrey, King, and Lloyd and Laura Jacobs Blankfein. One night, they decided to screen the award-winning BBC comedy Fleabag, which was made by a production company that Discovery now owns but which Zaslav hadn’t gotten around to watching. A minute into the first episode, the group found itself in the midst of a hot and heavy sex scene. Pause! “So I put my hand up,” recalls Zaslav. “I go, whoa ! So they stop it. And I said, ‘Okay, here’s the strategy. We either shut it off, or we put it back on and everybody only looks forward. We don’t look at each other until it’s over.’ ” (They opted for the latter.)

A recurring theme in my conversations with Zaslav’s nearest and dearest was his inveterate generosity. Canceling New Year’s Eve plans to spend the night in the hospital with a sick friend and a platter of Nobu sushi. Sending you chicken soup and matzo and fresh-squeezed orange juice when you’re home in bed with pneumonia. Flying a group of his oldest friends to Rome and hooking up a private tour of the Vatican to celebrate his 50th birthday. “Some of these people had never left the country,” said Krichmar, his childhood bestie. “When it comes to his friends, the people he has been connected with for so long, nothing else matters.”

When the world came to a screeching halt in March 2020, Zaslav found himself in one of the most difficult moments of his career. For starters, a number of his employees were ill, including three he’d recently been in meetings with. (Zaslav dodged the bullet.) No one was hospitalized, but some were sick enough to be monitoring oxygen levels and praying they didn’t deteriorate. “In my years at the company,” Zaslav said on our walk, “we’ve been thrown out of countries, we’ve failed at a lot of stuff, we’ve whiffed, we picked ourselves up. We’ve had a lot of challenges. The toughest thing was having the employees sick and talking to their significant others or their mom. And that’s on my watch. They got sick coming into Discovery to do work.” On top of that, Zaslav, like many CEOs, had to figure out how to keep the wheels turning with everyone suddenly working from home. “A normal day, I’ll go into the office, there’s six people outside, and we’re just running through stuff. And then I’m running down the hall and grab these six people: What do you think of this idea? None of that could go on. How do you run a company?”

To stay connected with the worker bees, Zaslav started making weekly videos to send to Discovery’s 10,000 employees all over the world. Nothing fancy: Zaslav’s youngest, who was quarantining in East Hampton with Mom and Dad, simply held up an iPhone and pressed record. In the first installment, Zaslav gave a tour of his home office, which consisted of a small desk outfitted with an iMac and a conference phone. The week-four video featured a coffee table covered in classic board games and a copy of Taschen’s “SUMO-size” illustrated history of the Rolling Stones (Zaslav’s favorite band). In another, shot in Zaslav’s kitchen, he gave everyone a taste of the comfort food he’d been throwing back: nonpareils, Pop Secret, Utz pretzels, and Reddi-wip. “I may be gaining a little bit of weight,” he said.

As I was writing this article, return-to-office plans throughout the corporate world were being upended thanks to the surging delta variant. Discovery’s homecoming came with an added layer of complexity. In addition to ironing out the plans for satellite offices in 34 countries, Zaslav was preparing to welcome all of his New York-based employees to the company’s brand-new global headquarters. (With the requisite public health protocols and hybrid schedules.) Discovery’s new home, across the street from BuzzFeed and around the block from a Netflix office, is a 19th-century building in the Flatiron District with 14 floors of fully renovated loft-style space. That includes a street-level test kitchen and production studio, a wellness center, an exercise room, and a verdant rooftop terrace with views, to the northwest, of Hudson Yards, where WarnerMedia has been headquartered since 2019. It’s too early to say whether any additional real estate transactions will be required once the deal closes, but either way, Zaslav will have plenty of other integration-oriented matters to contend with. “If I were to say what is David’s greatest challenge beyond getting closed as quickly as possible,” said Greenfield, the LightShed analyst, “it’s that he’s got a team of executives at WarnerMedia who have had a gut-wrenching five years: layoffs, changes of direction, new bosses. We don’t even know who’s coming and going as part of this new merger.… There’s been no consistency of leadership. And so the biggest challenge is people and execution. That’s David’s greatest challenge on day one.”

When I ran this by Zaslav during our Zoom call, he came back to the same point he’d been emphasizing throughout our conversations. “This is a pure content company,” he said. “It’s why most of us came into this business. We didn’t come into this business to build broadband. We didn’t come into this business to sell phones or to build cloud. The people that came into this business got here because we love telling stories. We love creating content and putting it on the screen. And that’s all that we’re going to do.… So I believe that that mission and that menu of content, as we look at it all in one place, is gonna create the excitement and the energy.”

On Tuesday, July 6, as the Allen & Company guests were pulling up one by one to the entrance of the Sun Valley Resort, Zaslav stepped out of a large SUV wearing a blue-and-white striped T-shirt and a hooded vest. Most of the arriving luminaries had simply ignored the assembled reporters, whose job was to stand around and shout questions that they knew probably wouldn’t be answered. But Zaslav obliged, which was lucky for the press, because he was the newsiest participant of the five-day gabfest, famous for its clandestine dealmaking. He stepped forward with a big smile, revealing a set of chompers fit for a Colgate commercial, and stopped for a chat with CNBC’s Julia Boorstin. At first, Zaslav rattled off a few brief and unsurprising remarks about how the media industry was primed for further consolidation. Then he uttered the four words that gave CNBC its headline: “We’re not done yet.”

It wasn’t entirely clear whether Zaslav was talking about the industry in general or Warner Bros. Discovery in particular, but no matter. Tongues were already wagging. In his industry newsletter, “What I’m Hearing,” former Hollywood Reporter editorial director Matthew Belloni speculated, “That company feels like a total placeholder to me. The Warner deal will close and either Zaslav or John Malone”—Zaslav’s mentor and the chairman of Liberty Media—“will call Aryeh”—as in Bourkoff, the banker du jour who brokered the Warner Discovery combo—“and tell him to find another deal. If it’s not ViacomCBS it’ll be NBCUniversal or Lionsgate or AMC Networks or Sony’s film and TV assets. Scale, scale, scale. Zaslav can’t think the combined company will be big enough, can he?”

Can he? I asked him before he had to jump off our Zoom for a parade of meetings with producers and agents and talent and other Hollywood folk. Is there yet another megadeal up his sleeve? Will Warner Bros. Discovery need to get bigger still?

“I think this deal will be the first sentence of my obituary,” he said, “that Discovery merged into Warner.” And the second sentence? “It soared.”

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