Following nearly a year of dealmaking, a window for top Warner Bros. Discovery executives to sell their stock opened up after the company reported its last quarterly earnings. SEC filings show that most of those top execs, including CEO David Zaslav, took advantage of it.
Zaslav filed to sell more than four million shares in the company, with a value of just over $114 million, on Tuesday. Other executives, including CFO Gunnar Weidenfels, streaming chief JB Perrette, chief revenue and strategy officer Bruce Campbell, and international chief Gerhard Zeiler also filed to sell shares worth millions, per forms filed with the SEC Tuesday.
The executives won’t receive all of the proceeds, as a portion will be held for tax purposes, the filings indicate.
The sales came as WBD now has a signed deal to sell itself in a $111 billion deal to Paramount Skydance, for $31 per share. A year ago, WBD shares were trading at $11 per share.
So why the sell-off? WBD has been engaged in a state of dealmaking since last June, when it announced its plan to split itself into two companies. A few months later, Paramount, led by David Ellison, reached out to inquire about an acquisition. What followed, of course, was a public process that ultimately brought Netflix and NBCUniversal into the mix, leading to last week’s shocking turn of events.
Top executives can only sell shares in short windows, after public companies report earnings, to avoid allegations of insider trading. Because of the split announcement in June, and then the sale process and hostile tender that ran through last week, there hadn’t been a window for executives to sell until now.
Zaslav is set to receive north of $600 million for his shares in the company (the final number is still to be determined given Paramount’s overbid of Netflix), while other top executives will take home more than $100 million. The sales this week are just an opening salvo ahead of the deal-close payout.
