Warner Discovery CEO made $498M in the last 5 years– 384x the average writer

[ThrowawayR2]

> "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.

[terrytwillstein]

You read a story about an exec being paid half a billion over five years and you lose sympathy for the people making $260K? I barely make $45k myself, but my takeaway isn't that the people asking for fairer compensation don't deserve it because they make more than me already.

What a reductive view. Labor unionization sucks in this country for opinions like this.

[gamblor956]

The average (mean) pay is inflated by the pay that goes to the top writers making several millions annually. The median pay is far less than $260k; the WGA estimate it is now around $70k. I know plenty of writers that were making comfortable upper-middle-class lives 10 years ago that now make less than $100k/year despite working more, on multiple shows each year.

EDIT: One of my friends was a writer on a FOX broadcast show a few years ago. With the writer's room salary and residuals from one broadcast episode script, she and her husband were able to buy a house in LA near El Segundo. She's a showrunner now for a streaming show, but makes less now than she did as a staff writer. For a tech analogy: imagine if you made it to CTO and made less than you did as a junior programmer even though the company was making even more off of your work than it did before.

Somehow any iota of outrage I might have felt just evaporated. Elites griping about even bigger elites don't muster much sympathy.

Yes, this is how everyone outside of tech thinks about tech people these days... Remember that you said this the next time you're out of work and looking for sympathy and people are talking crap about you.

[sanp]

This is exactly what the elites are relying on. Complete lack of labor solidarity. Writer earning $260k (median for writers in Hollywood is probably far lower) and someone making $40k are both labor and need to be united against capital with resources to get its way with legislature and courts.

[xracy]

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?

[arp242]

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.

[eesmith]

How little do they need to make before you feel outrage?

Can you still have support and sympathy without outrage?

What are some of the strikes in the last few decades where you have felt outrage, and how did that help the strike effort?

[ok_dad]

“Average“ means there are a few who make millions and the rest make like 40-80k. JK Rowling would still be considered a writer, for instance, pushing the average up for her few movies.

[barbariangrunge]

Those are the writers who get paid, and while they’re working. A lot have to write for “credit,” hoping that next time they can get a contract that pays

[Ekaros]

I thought they were some sort of starving artist making near minimum wage... But 260k on average... Either there must be someone earning millions there... Or it really isn't that bad.

Not that CEOs aren't hugely overpaid either...

[ksec]

Let'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?

[1123581321]

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.)

[pcurve]

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.

[HWR_14]

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.

[SilasX]

Yeah and the stock plummeted in that time.

[voisin]

It is crazy that anyone can make this level of wealth without taking massive risk with their own capital.

[missedthecue]

That's eye watering but turns out most of it was given in performance based stock options a few years ago, staggered over seven years, at prices (judging by today's stock value) that will never be hit.

Not to say he doesn't make a lot of money...

[pyrophane]

Zaslav, 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.

[blitzar]

> 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.

[aetherane]

That's not how business taxes work. You are taxed on profits.

[pard68]

Who did he piss off to get this written?

[labster]

Everyone at CNN, who work for him, so some reporter probably fed it to colleagues at CNBC.

[dmonitor]

the writers

[stcroixx]

Similar gap regardless of industry. Fix should not be industry specific.

[projectileboy]

The average writer made over $1M? Even for TV or cinema that sounds high. What’s the median?

[MattRix]

A million over five years.

[iancmceachern]

And they probably didn't even write a single script