There's a fascinating barometer for measuring corporate dysfunction: ask employees who they'd rather have as their new overlord. At Warner Bros. Discovery, the answer is clear—and it's a brutal indictment of David Zaslav's leadership.
According to Variety's reporting, staffers at WBD would overwhelmingly prefer a sale to Netflix over a merger with Paramount. Let that sink in: employees would rather work for a company that famously disrupted their entire industry than continue under current management or join forces with another struggling legacy studio.
This isn't just water-cooler gossip. It's a referendum on the state of traditional media.
Since the WarnerMedia-Discovery merger, Zaslav has presided over a cost-cutting spree that's become legendary for all the wrong reasons. Shows canceled for tax write-offs. Films shelved despite being complete. The gutting of HBO Max's prestige brand in favor of the clunkier Max. The whole operation feels less like strategic consolidation and more like strip-mining for quarterly earnings.
Employees aren't stupid. They can see the difference between Netflix's ruthless-but-forward-looking approach and WBD's desperate attempt to make the traditional studio model profitable again. One company is building the future of entertainment; the other is trying to resurrect its past.
The Paramount merger rumors only make things worse. Combining two struggling legacy media companies doesn't create strength—it creates a larger target for the streaming era's disruption. Employees know this. They'd rather jump to Netflix, a company that actually understands the business they're in now, not the one they wish still existed.
What's remarkable is the schadenfreude baked into this story. Zaslav positioned himself as the industry's cost-cutting genius, the guy who'd finally make streaming profitable through sheer financial discipline. Instead, he's created a workplace so dysfunctional that his own employees are publicly rooting for a takeover.
This is the death rattle of the traditional studio model—not with a bang, but with employees actively hoping their company gets absorbed by the very force that disrupted it in the first place.
In Hollywood, nobody knows anything. But at Warner Bros. Discovery, employees apparently know enough to want out.
