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Portrait of The Zaz as a Young Dealmaker

Decades before he christened the deal of the streaming age, David Zaslav cut his teeth under the tutelage of Jack Welch, Bob Wright and John Malone. The formative years of his career explain as much about the history of cable as they portend about the future of streaming.

WBD C.E.O. David Zaslav, at the end of the 9 a.m. call, described CNN as an “unmoored boat.” But, he said, “this is our company, our boat. We all have an oar.”
WBD C.E.O. David Zaslav described CNN as an “unmoored boat.” But, he said, “this is our company, our boat. We all have an oar.” Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
William D. Cohan
October 27, 2021

Sure, now everyone knows that David Zaslav is one of the most powerful media executives on the planet and the architect of one the most riveting mergers in years—Discovery Communications’s still-pending $43 billion acquisition of WarnerMedia from AT&T—that will transform the media landscape and create a serious rival to Disney and Netflix. But, once upon a time, years before he became C.E.O. of Discovery in 2007 (and one of the world’s highest-paid corporate executives), the Young Zaz was a pioneer in the cable business, and one of the handful of people who recognized early on that television broadcasting—now known as “linear TV”—was dying, and that the future lay not only in cable television but also in creating content for cable television.