“He fleeced all of Hollywood”: Comedian Jay Jurden reacts to Warner Bros CEO David Zaslav pocketing about $600M from the Paramount merger 

David Zaslav, the sixty-six-year-old former president and CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, has made headlines recently, as the Paramount-WBD merger officially closed on Oct. 6. Zaslav led the company for more than four years before it agreed to be acquired by David Ellison’s Paramount, and he is walking away from it all considerably richer.

As per an SEC filing, Zaslav is set to receive a total of $606.1 million, a figure that covers shares he held in the company. As per a report shared by Variety, stock options alone account for $381.7 million of that sum, though that portion is subject to withholding taxes, and his overall proceeds are subject to capital gains taxes. Not everything worked in his favour, though. He held 14.98 million stock options that turned worthless after the merger closed, as the exercise prices on those options exceeded the deal’s $31.0167 per share acquisition price.

Comedian Jay Jurden, who has more than sixty-five thousand followers on Threads, reacted to the news of the payout and kept it short.

“He fleeced all of Hollywood,” shared Jurden.

David Zaslav and top Warner Bros. Discovery executives pocket millions as Paramount closes the merger:

Paramount wasted little time making its presence known, as the company swiftly painted “A Skydance Corporation” on the famous Warner Bros. water tower in Burbank. David Zaslav wasn’t the only one walking away from the merger with a significant sum. Several top Warner Bros. Discovery executives exited alongside him, including CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels, Bruce Campbell who served as chief revenue and strategy officer, co-chairs of Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group Pamela Abdy and Michael De Luca, and Scott Miller, who was president of networks and streaming distribution.

Other Warner Bros. Discovery executives also received millions from the takeover. As per a report shared by Variety, Wiedenfels, Campbell, and WBD head of international Gerhard Zeiler, who is currently making a run at Austrian politics, were among those who benefited. JB Perrette, previously WBD’s head of streaming and games, also received a payout and has since joined David Ellison’s Skydance as co-chair and chief business officer of both Skydance TV and Skydance DTC streaming divisions.

David Zaslav leaves behind a transformed Warner Bros. Discovery:

The road wasn’t without its bumps. At WBD’s annual shareholder meeting in June, a majority of shareholders voted against golden parachute packages for David Zaslav and other named executives, as well as their 2025 compensation plans. That being said, the numbers David Zaslav leaves behind at Warner Bros. Discovery tell a different story.

As per the report shared by Variety, WBD carried roughly $53 billion in gross debt in mid-2022. By June 2026, that figure had been reduced to $33.1 billion. The company also went from posting a pro-forma EBITDA loss of about $2.1 billion for the full year of 2022, to generating an EBITDA profit of $1.4 billion in 2025, and has been on track for double-digit percentage growth in subscriber related revenue in 2026.

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Over the years, Zaslav and his team made job cuts across the company to reduce costs and improve operating efficiency, and he more than doubled the number of employees who held equity in WBD compared with the two companies separately beforehand. David Zaslav has been among the most highly compensated CEOs in media. His 2025 pay package totalled $165 million, which included a one-time stock options grant valued at $109.6 million, awarded to him in June 2025 for his work on a plan to split WBD into two publicly traded entities.

That split never happened, as the Paramount Skydance deal took precedence. The newly formed Skydance has since assumed WBD’s remaining debt load, which now sits at an eye-popping $80 billion.

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