A Paramount-Warner Deal Will Sour. I Won’t Be Surprised.

David Zaslav, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO and president, said Tuesday that the company is for sale. (PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP/Getty Images)

About the author: Bill Saporito is a veteran business journalist. He has worked for Time, Fortune, and Inc. magazines and is an occasional opinion contributor to the New York Times.

Last week, the CEO and president of Warner Bros. Discovery, David Zaslav, said his company is “reconsidering its strategic options” amid Paramount Skydance’s repeated attempts to buy it.

That is to say, everything is for sale: HBO, CNN, TNT, Discovery Network, Warner Bros. Even Bugs Bunny. (In case you have lost track, Zaslav pieced together this hodgepodge of news channels, a movie studio, and linear television in 2022.) Paramount prepared an unsolicited bid for WBD last month, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal. It has come back twice more with higher offers.

Big deals like this seldom work out for investors, not to mention employees. That’s my professional judgment based on four decades of covering major media acquisitions as a business journalist. This Paramount deal would be no different.

Don’t be mistaken: Zaslav will be a winner, regardless of how this deal turns out. “Zazz” always seems to manage a payout. He earned $52 million in 2024, despite WBD losing $11.5 billion. At least a thousand jobs were chopped that year in WBD’s restructuring.

For me, a Paramount takeover would be an opportunity to unload the remaining shares of WBD that I hold courtesy of working for big media and enduring failed media deals made by corporate owners, of which there have been many.

My first taste of awful media dealmaking was in 1990, when the magazine company I worked for, Time Inc., merged with Warner Communications. Warner was a famous but flagging movie studio that also owned cable television systems and theme parks. I covered the story for Fortune, which was then owned by Time Inc. That was awkward, given the disdain for it among my colleagues. But Time’s bosses had rightfully concluded that, as a print magazine company, they were staring down a future of lower profits and dominance by an emerging technology: cable television. They feared being left behind.

Warner’s top executive at the time of the deal was a charming hustler named Steve Ross. Ross collected movie stars and said all the right things about preserving our sacred journalism. The ensuing culture clash was almost comical.

But things were to get worse still. Of all the bad deals I was subject to, the spectacularly awful AOL Time Warner merger of 2001 stands out. Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin—an executive behind HBO—believed this merger would be transformational. And it was. In Time’s desperate effort to get on board the internet train, the company transformed more than $160 billion in shareholder value to vapor as the stock price plunged from about $110 to $9. Our stock options became worthless. Our 401(k)s took that hit, too—a good reminder to avoid overweighting your savings in your own company’s shares.

It would take eight years of underperformance before the AOL albatross would be removed from our necks, spun off and sent into oblivion. TWX stock rose 25% in the year after it sold AOL.

There would be no Hollywood ending for me—just another turn of the dealmaking screw.

In 2014, Time Warner spun off Time Inc., the magazine bit of the company. At the time, the company was being run by Jeff Bewkes, a former HBO honcho who professed a love for journalism but who sucked dividends out of the magazine division. I remember him telling the audience at the TIME100 dinner that year how much better off we would be as an independent company. We all knew that was utter nonsense.

We didn’t have a prayer, and eventually Time Inc. was sold to Meredith, a media conglomerate. Meredith only wanted female-focused titles, such as People and InStyle. So Time magazine was sold to Marc Benioff, co-founder of Salesforce; Fortune was unloaded to a Thai business mogul. My 401(k) stayed with Meredith.

Bewkes wasn’t done. In 2018, he dished Time Warner to AT&T for $85.4 billion. My TWX shares became T shares. At last, a widows and orphans stock that paid a dividend! Except that the then-CEO of AT&T, Randall Stephenson, suffered from the same digital transformation delusion that had consumed Levin almost two decades prior. The now Time-less WarnerMedia division was supposed to fill AT&T’s fiberoptic, wireless and satellite networks with premium content that would drive subscriptions, fatten monthly bills and move the stock price.

The stock price did move, although not in my preferred direction. T became a market laggard, saddled with high debt and a disconcertingly high yield. Stephenson’s successor, John Stankey, under pressure from activist investors, didn’t wait long to pull the plug on AT&T’s media assets.

Enter Zazz. In 2022, Zaslav stepped up with a deal to merge WarnerMedia with Discovery, despite the fact that the Hollywood studio model was irretrievably broken and linear television wasn’t far behind. The product of that merger has, by many metrics, failed. WBD has reported net income loss every year since and has undergone multiple rounds of layoffs.

The impending sale of WBD to Paramount would mark the end of one fork in the road for me as a Time Inc., Time-Warner, AOL Time Warner, Not-AOL-Time Warner, AT&T/WarnerMedia, AT&T/ Warner Bros. Discovery employee and shareholder. Yet, even if Zazz ultimately manages to dump his unwieldy bag of media assets, I still might take a loss on my WBD shares; I’ve loved being in the media, just not an investor in the media.

Not that I’m ungrateful. The Time Inc. I joined in the 1980s, which was earning 20% net margins on its print magazines, offered profit-sharing, stock options, and a matching 401(k) plan, far more than most in media receive today. I also have a pension—another legacy media relic. Because of a past merger, it is managed by AT&T, which considers me a retired Bellhead. Can I sell you a wireless plan? When I actually do retire, AT&T will likely sponsor my healthcare.

The personal irony here is that in Newark, N.J., where I was born, working for Ma Bell was considered the golden ticket.

Guess I finally got one.

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