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.”
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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