Paramount Global's top two executives collected a combined $124 million in compensation for 2025, a year in which the struggling media company laid off thousands of workers and saw its stock crater amid the Skydance merger.
CEO David Ellison took home $63.2 million, while President Jeff Shell received $60.7 million, according to regulatory filings. The eye-popping packages came during a period when Paramount executed multiple rounds of layoffs, shuttered productions, and wrote down billions in asset values as traditional media companies struggle with the shift to streaming.
Let's be clear about what happened here: Ellison, whose Skydance Media acquired Paramount in a complex deal, essentially paid himself a massive sum while the company he now runs shed jobs and market value. The compensation packages were structured as part of the merger agreement, not as performance bonuses tied to shareholder returns. That distinction matters.
For context, Paramount's stock declined sharply during this period as investors questioned the company's ability to compete with streaming giants like Netflix and Disney+. The traditional media playbook making money from cable subscriptions and theatrical releases is broken, and Paramount has struggled more than peers to adapt.
The $124 million payout becomes even more stark when compared to the compensation of workers who lost their jobs. If you assume an average fully loaded cost of $150,000 per employee (salary plus benefits), that executive compensation could have funded more than 800 jobs for a year. Instead, it went to two people at the top.
This is a story we've seen before in corporate America: Executives engineer deals that guarantee them massive payouts regardless of how shareholders or workers fare. The Skydance-Paramount merger agreement, negotiated by Ellison on both sides of the transaction (he was buying the company his family partially owned), locked in these compensation packages as deal terms.
Shareholders, for their part, had limited say in the matter. The merger was structured in a way that gave controlling shareholder Shari Redstone and her family the final decision, sidelining other investors who watched their holdings lose value. It's the kind of corporate governance arrangement that looks great for insiders and terrible for everyone else.
The broader media industry is watching Paramount's trajectory closely. If Ellison and Shell can turn the company around boost streaming subscribers, rationalize costs, and find profitable content strategies then perhaps the compensation will look justified in hindsight. But right now, it looks like classic corporate wealth extraction.
Compare this to other media companies navigating the same difficult transition. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav has faced similar criticism for high compensation amid layoffs, but at least WBD has shown progress in reducing debt and improving streaming economics. Paramount's path forward remains murky.
The numbers don't lie, but executives sometimes do. When asked about layoffs and cost-cutting, media executives inevitably talk about "strategic repositioning" and "aligning resources with priorities." What they mean is: We're cutting jobs to protect our own compensation and Wall Street's demands for improved margins.
For Paramount employees who lost jobs, watching their former executives collect nine-figure payouts must sting. For shareholders who saw their investment decline, it's another reminder that in corporate America, management often eats first and everyone else gets table scraps.
