While David Zaslav has stolen most of the headlines for his personal financial gains from the Warner Bros. Discovery-Paramount merger, several other rich payouts are in the offing.
The same SEC filing that laid out Zaslav’s expected $700 million-plus in merger-related compensation Monday also included some eye-popping figures for other principals. A large chunk of the loot – almost $384 million – is going to three key members of the management team that has flanked Zaslav since it assembled atop the Discovery Communications org chart nearly a decade ago.
JB Perrette, head of streaming and video games at WBD, will receive $142 million in various merger-related proceeds, per the filing; Chief Revenue and Strategy Officer Bruce Campbell will get $121.5 million; and CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels $120 million.
Gerhard Zeiler, a Turner and WarnerMedia veteran who was tapped as president of international for WBD in 2022 after the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery, is in line for $82.6 million.
The filing said the estimated tallies are “based on multiple assumptions that may or may not actually occur or be accurate” and actual amounts may differ. Already in the past two weeks, Zaslav and senior execs have sold WBD shares. Zaslav’s were worth $114 million, confirming his new status as a billionaire. The merger compensation, notably, is separate from execs’ 2025 compensation, which will be disclosed later this spring.
The gaudy pay figures have set tongues wagging on Wall Street and Hollywood, with the former largely praising the management team for its financial maneuvers and the latter despairing at the scale of the profits from a brief but volatile stewardship of Warner Bros. and HBO. The Paramount merger, critics fear, will result in significant layoffs and further blows to traditional Hollywood. (Paramount execs have pushed back firmly against that narrative in recent days.)
Until the past few months, when Netflix and Paramount jockeyed for position in trying to acquire the Warner assets, WBD stock had been under water for more than three years. Only in December 2025 did it break above the level of $24.43, where it closed on the day the Warner-Discovery deal was consummated in April 2022. At one point last spring, it slipped below $8 a share.
Initial projections for EBITDA ahead of the Warner-Discovery deal proved overly optimistic, a fact that has been cited by skeptics of the Paramount deal. On Monday, shares closed at $27.51, down from its level when the Paramount deal was announced and below the $31-per-share price of Paramount’s pending offer.
The financial disclosures came less than a day after Warner Bros had a huge night at the Academy Awards, winning 11 trophies including Best Picture for One Battle After Another. In a memo to employees on Monday, Zaslav hailed Warners co-chiefs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy and their staff for their “commitment to filmmakers and to championing bold, original stories.”
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Along with senior WBD executives, financial advisers involved in the $110 billion merger will be in the money. The sequence of events from December, when WBD’s board of directors accepted an $82.7 billion offer from Netflix to acquire WBD’s studio-and-streaming division, through the February switch to Paramount’s offer for all of WBD, resulted in extra payments.
WBD said it has agreed to pay investment firm Allen & Co. an aggregate cash fee of $100 million, $20 million of it linked with the Netflix agreement, which was terminated after Netflix declined to revise its offer on February 26.
WBD has also agreed to pay J.P. Morgan $90 million, of which $15 million was connected to the Netflix proposal. Of the total, $40 million is contingent upon the close of the merger, which WBD and Paramount expect to come by the third quarter of 2026. (A “ticking fee” of 25 cents a share per day, which will kick in after September 30, could be among the factors altering the final payouts.)
During the two-year period leading up to J.P. Morgan’s latest merger opinion, the financial institution had made about $204 million from WBD, the filing said. It also collected $2 million from Paramount, $12 million from RedBird Capital and $13 million from Oracle. RedBird is an investor in Paramount and its managing partner, Gerry Cardinale, sits on Paramount’s board. Oracle was co-founded by Larry Ellison, a financial backer of the merger and father of Paramount CEO David Ellison.