Chief executives like to philosophize—it’s one of the ways that the art of corporate governance, strategic investment, and financial sponge-wringing ascends to a higher art form. David Zaslav, for instance, occasionally likens his leadership of Warner Bros. Discovery to the painting of an enormous fresco. In private conversations with friends, he uses this analogy to emphasize the massive time and effort required to combine two disparate legacy media assets, restructure the business, and generate cash flow, and also to dismiss what he sees as the myopia of his critics. In Zaz’s telling, his detractors in Hollywood, the press, and on Wall Street are too worried about the inevitable plaster falling on the floor—layoffs, Batgirl, the TCM cuts, etcetera—to recognize the efficient, cash-flow-positive economic masterpiece (in support of Barbie and White Lotus, among others) that he is creating above them.