As Paramount Skydance’s deal to take over Warner Bros. Discovery is still pending, WBD CEO David Zaslav is continuing to cash out his stock in the company he is set to depart in the coming months.
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Zaslav filed to sell about 2.18 million shares of Warner Bros. Discovery stock, valued at $59.47 million, according to an SEC filing Monday. That comes after Zaslav filed to sell $114 million worth of WBD stock in March.
Once Paramount Skydance’s megadeal to buy WBD closes, Zaslav is poised to walk away with a golden parachute package that Warner Bros. Discovery this spring had pegged as being worth more than half a billion dollars. With the sale of Warner Bros. Discovery to Paramount, Zaslav will have a net worth that has been estimated to be more than $1 billion.
Zaslav has been among the highest-compensation CEOs in the media biz. In 2025, his pay package totaled $165 million, including $3 million base salary, $22.6 million in stock, a $25.7 million cash bonus and stock options valued at $109.6 million, according to a company SEC filing. In purely symbolic moves, WBD shareholders voted against Zaslav’s exit pay package and his 2025 compensation.
In late 2025, Warner Bros. Discovery had clinched a deal with Netflix to buy Warner Bros.’s streaming and studios businesses. But Netflix backed out of the bidding in February after Paramount upped its takeout offer for all of WBD in a deal worth $111 billion. Paramount has said it expects to close the WBD deal in the third quarter of 2026.
Separately Monday, a coalition of 12 Democratic state attorneys general sued to block the David Ellison-led Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery on antitrust grounds. Paramount says it will “vigorously defend the transaction” and claimed that the states’ lawsuit will “shield those dominant streaming platforms like Netflix and technology companies from much-needed competition.”
The Paramount-WBD deal is still pending regulatory approval in the U.K., where officials have said they are likely to intervene. According to Paramount, the Warner Bros. mergers has been cleared by regulators in 24 jurisdictions, including by the U.S. Justice Department, which did not impose any requirements for divestitures or other concessions on the part of Paramount Skydance.
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