Who did he piss off to get this written?
Everyone at CNN, who work for him, so some reporter probably fed it to colleagues at CNBC.
Warner Discovery CEO made $498M in the last 5 years– 384x the average writer
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Re: Warner Discovery CEO made $498M in the last 5 years– 384x the average writer
#22Zaslav, of course, is famous for killing a lot of in-production Warner Bros. projects to take a tax write-off on them when he took over. This includes the Batgirl movie, which was in post-production at the time. Crazy to think how many people worked for years on that film only to have it all thrown away at the end like that. If I'd been heavily involved in making it I might have left the industry after that.
> This includes the Batgirl movie, which was in post-production at the time.
They screened it and it was so bad they threw it and the 90mil they spent on it in the bin as there was nothing salvageable. Sometimes, despite all hard work and good intentions, the final result is still trash.
If it was going to make a billion at the box office, they would not "write it off" for tax purposes.
Re: Warner Discovery CEO made $498M in the last 5 years– 384x the average writer
#23It is crazy that anyone can make this level of wealth without taking massive risk with their own capital.
Re: Warner Discovery CEO made $498M in the last 5 years– 384x the average writer
#24> " Meanwhile, average pay for Hollywood writers has remained virtually flat at about $260,000 as 2021,... " Somehow any iota of outrage I might have felt just evaporated. Elites griping about even bigger elites don't muster much sympathy.
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Re: Warner Discovery CEO made $498M in the last 5 years– 384x the average writer
#25Let's ignore the 384x average writer for a second. A company with a current market cap of $28B paid half a billion to its CEO over the past 5 years?
As a shareholder of WBD, I wish I had kinder words to say other than he's grossly incompetent and negligent. Considering how fragmented and diversified the WBD divisions are, I really question the need of this guy's role altogether.
"Meanwhile, average pay for Hollywood writers has remained virtually flat at about $260,000 as 2021, the Times reports"
That's actually higher than I thought. Good on them. Writing is hard.
Re: Warner Discovery CEO made $498M in the last 5 years– 384x the average writer
#26Let's ignore the 384x average writer for a second. A company with a current market cap of $28B paid half a billion to its CEO over the past 5 years?
I do not like the CEO but his pay is part of their high revenue and high expense industry that doesn’t sustain a huge market cap. The total expenses of the combined companies over five years are in the ballpark of two hundred billion (someone please correct this.)
Re: Warner Discovery CEO made $498M in the last 5 years– 384x the average writer
#27The average writer made over $1M? Even for TV or cinema that sounds high. What’s the median?
Re: Warner Discovery CEO made $498M in the last 5 years– 384x the average writer
#28> " Meanwhile, average pay for Hollywood writers has remained virtually flat at about $260,000 as 2021,... " Somehow any iota of outrage I might have felt just evaporated. Elites griping about even bigger elites don't muster much sympathy.
It's not really clear to me that number is correct; looking on the internet I also see other (much lower) numbers, as well as mentions that ~25% goes to overhead in the form of agents and such. I can't really find a good source on what the yearly net income of a WGA writer really is.
But the strike is really about increasing the minimum wage, not the average. The "average wage" isn't really a good metric in the first place.
Re: Warner Discovery CEO made $498M in the last 5 years– 384x the average writer
#29> " Meanwhile, average pay for Hollywood writers has remained virtually flat at about $260,000 as 2021,... " Somehow any iota of outrage I might have felt just evaporated. Elites griping about even bigger elites don't muster much sympathy.
First off, other people have mentioned average.
But I'll just throw in that this sentiment is dangerous. Squabbling over the difference between 40k and 260k, is missing the mark, and exactly what CEOs want you to think about because ultimately... The difference between the CEO pay and the upper end of the writers is 0.26/76.8M vs. 0.04/76.8M
Or 0.3% of CEO salary for the average, and 0.05% of CEO pay for the lower end. You can bet the CEO wants you to be fighting about how much more pay the other writers are getting over you, and not how much they're getting over everyone else. Like, yeah, by all means let's worry about how one writer is making 15% of another writer sometime after we've dealt with the obviously larger problem.
Also, what have they legitimately added to the company to deserve that much pay?
Re: Warner Discovery CEO made $498M in the last 5 years– 384x the average writer
#30Let's ignore the 384x average writer for a second. A company with a current market cap of $28B paid half a billion to its CEO over the past 5 years?
More importantly, a CEO who has repeatedly made widely criticized decisions that have been driving the stock price down repeatedly was paid half a billion.