![]() The previous evening, during the plane ride, Zaslav had reflected on his history. Their driver deposited them at George Clooney’s former bungalow so Zaslav could prepare. Zaslav had brought along Discovery’s chief corporate operating officer, David Leavy, and the company’s H.R. ![]() 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 flown into Burbank to introduce himself to WarnerMedia’s 27,000 employees. 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.” 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. 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. 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. 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. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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