The Post-Zaz Second Marriage Fantasies

Gunnar Wiedenfels
The combination makes a lot of sense: A combined entity would have better ability to pay down the debt that Gunnar Wiedenfels, pictured, will be stuck with after the spinoff of Zaz’s business. Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images
William D. Cohan
September 10, 2025

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On Wall Street, one of the more popular parlor games is to speculate on who might acquire the spun-off divisions of companies that investment bankers helped merge only a few years before. At the moment, for instance, intellectual bets are being placed on what’s going to happen to the two pieces of David Zaslav’s Warner Bros. Discovery when its separation is completed sometime around the middle of next year. Will Warner Bros., Zaz’s streaming and studio business, persist without a partner? Will Discovery Global, Gunnar Wiedenfels’s portfolio of cable networks like CNN and HGTV, make it on its own, or must it be merged into another lonely TV bundle? Interested parties, of course, include the swath of investment bankers hoping to get in on the action.