Powerhouse Discovery Inc. president and CEO David Zaslav, consistently one of the highest paid CEOs of a public company ever since he took the reins at Discovery in 2007, announced Discovery’s tightly brokered blockbuster takeover of WarnerMedia earlier this week. And the media landscape was shooketh.
At least one report, in Variety, indicates the surprise mega-merger “was hatched during a series of meetings and calls in the Greenwich Village townhouse” of Zaslav, who’s 2020 compensation package totaled $37.7 million, a staggering sum by any standard but well below the $129.4 million in compensation he received in 2018 and even less than the stratospheric $156.1 million he hoovered up back in 2014. To be more clear, Zaslav’s base salary has held steady for more than a decade at $3 million per year, with the bulk of his annual compensation granted in vesting stock awards, option awards and non-equity incentives. Still, it would take a median-salary Discovery worker who earns about $80,000 a year nearly 500 years to earn what Zaslav did in 2020.
Like most spectacularly compensated media titans, Zaslav and his wife Pamela maintain a jaw-dropping property portfolio. In addition to a huge high-floor duplex in one of the finer buildings along New York’s Central Park West, there’s an oceanfront getaway in the Hamptons and, as of early 2020, a fabled estate in Beverly Hills.
However, it seems the low-key and much-in-the-news corporate exec seeks to thin his holdings with the sale of a 19th-century Greek Revival townhouse on an especially prime block in New York’s Greenwich Village that has come up for grabs at a dollop under $17.9 million. It’s quite possible this is the aforementioned townhouse mentioned in Variety, though listings held by Chris Poore and Eyal Dagan, both at Brown Harris Stevens, indicate the historic home is currently a construction zone in the midst of a comprehensive overhaul.