As TNT Sports parent company Warner Bros. Discovery prepares to split into two entities, the compensation for top executives David Zaslav and Gunnar Wiedenfels is being reworked substantially to respond to heavy shareholder pushback.
WBD said that it will “significantly reduce” the target annual compensation of Zaslav, the company’s CEO, after his $51.9 million total for 2024 recently received a firm rebuke from investors—particularly as WBD continues to see issues with a lagging stock performance and is still working through the loss of its live NBA rights. Wiedenfels, the current CFO, also signed a new employment agreement that retools his pay in preparation for the new corporate structure.
In a newly completed agreement, Zaslav will keep his base salary at $3 million, but an annual cash bonus that reached $23.9 million in 2024 will fall to a new target of $6 million, with that bonus payout capped at $12 million and based on the achievement of performance goals. Zaslav’s stock awards that were $23.1 million last year will fall to $15.5 million in the first year of the new deal, and $7.5 million annually thereafter.
To help retain Zaslav, one of the highest-paid executives in the media business, in the lower pay structure, WBD’s board also approved a “one-time inducement” that includes an award of nearly 21 million stock options vesting in a complex formula based on time and performance measures.
Wiedenfels, meanwhile, will get a base salary of $2.5 million, an annual cash bonus that will cap at $17.5 million, and equity awards targeted at $16 million per year. His bonus and stock awards, too, are tied specifically to performance goals and will have some vesting requirements.
Responding to Feedback
WBD said in a filing with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission that the new compensation agreements will “address stockholder feedback and preferences with respect to CEO compensation structure and foster a stronger pay-for-performance alignment.” The company added that it took into account several other factors, such as “peer group practices and benchmarks.”
The reworked compensation agreements mark another major move as WBD plans to become two independent, publicly traded companies beginning in mid-2026: a Streaming & Studios operation led by Zaslav that will include WBD’s film and TV productions and its streaming operations, and a separate Global Networks business led by Wiedenfels that will include TNT Sports in the U.S., Bleacher Report, CNN, Discovery, and free-to-air channels in Europe.
The Global Networks group will have the core of TNT Sports, but Wiedenfels acknowledged last week that the long-term streaming future of the sports programming is still unsettled and will be determined “over time.” That effort could become complicated, however, as Zaslav also said that sports “hasn’t been a real driver” for streaming consumption on Max, which is about to revert to its prior HBO Max name.
