A few months ago, after a lengthy and sobering review of Warner Bros. Discovery‘s business, Chief Executive David Zaslav gave his division heads a cutthroat mission.
Pretend your units are family businesses, Zaslav said. Start from scratch and prioritize free cash flow, he added, according to people familiar with the matter. Then, Zaslav said, come back to me with a new strategic plan for your unit.
Zaslav’s directive has led to what will amount to thousands of layoffs at the company by the middle of this month, said the people, along with substantial strategic changes at CNN, the Warner Bros. film studio and other divisions.
The CEO formed his plan after he took a hard look at the finances of the combined WarnerMedia-Discovery, a deal that closed in April. Zaslav determined the company was a mess. AT&T mismanaged WarnerMedia through neglect and profligate spending, he’d decided, according to people familiar with his discussions. The people asked not to be identified because the talks were private.
Warner Bros. Discovery’s total debt of about $50 billion was tens of billions more than the company’s market capitalization. About $5 billion of that debt is due by the end of 2024 after paying off $6 billion since the close of the merger. The company could push back the maturity on some bonds if necessary, but interest rates have risen dramatically, making refinancing much costlier.
To pay down debt, any company needs cash — ideally, from operations. But the near-term trends suggested Warner Bros. Discovery’s business was getting worse, not better. The company announced free cash flow for the third quarter was negative $192 million, compared to $705 million a year earlier. Cash from operating activities was $1.5 billion for the first nine months of 2022, down from $1.9 billion a year earlier.
Along with the rise in rates, Netflix‘s global revenue and subscriber growth had slowed, prompting investors to bail on peer stocks — including Warner Bros. Discovery, which had spent the past three years developing streaming services HBO Max and Discovery+. Moreover, the advertising market was collapsing as corporate valuations flagged. Zaslav said last month the ad market has been weaker than at any point during the 2020 pandemic.
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Warner Bros. Discovery shares have fallen more than 50% since WarnerMedia and Discovery closed the deal in April. Its market value stands at about $26 billion.
The immediate decisions allowed Zaslav to take advantage of tax efficiencies that come with changes in strategy after a merger. Warner Bros. Discovery expects to take up to $2.5 billion in content impairment and development write-offs by 2024. The company, which has about 40,000 employees, has booked $2 billion in synergies for 2023. Overall, Zaslav has promised $3.5 billion in cost cuts to investors — up from an initial promise of $3 billion.
The underlying rationale behind Zaslav’s cost-cutting strategy centered on turning Warner Bros. Discovery into a cash flow generator. Not only would cash be needed to pay off debt, but Zaslav’s pitch to investors would be to view his company as a shining light in the changing entertainment world — a legacy media company that actually makes real money.
“You should be measuring us in free cash flow and EBITDA [earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization],” Zaslav said an investor conference run by RBC Capital Markets last month. “We’re driving for free cash flow.”
“It isn’t going to be overnight, and there’s going to be a lot of grumbling because you don’t generate $3.5 billion of operating synergies without, you know, breaking a few eggs today,” Warner Bros. Discovery board member and media mogul John Malonetold CNBC in an interview last month.
Cash rules everything
Malone has co-strategized and cheered Zaslav’s effort to focus the company on maximizing free cash flow, which is defined as net income plus depreciation and amortization minus capital expenditures.
“Whenever I talk to David, the first thing I say is manage your cash,” Malone said last month. “Cash generation will ultimately be the metric that David’s success or failure will be judged on.”
Even before Zaslav gave his directive to all of the division heads, the new CEO was already thinking about how to boost cash flow. That was at least part of the motivation to eliminate CNN+ just weeks after it launched, which had a spending budget of about $165 million in 2022 and an eventual $350 million, according to people familiar with the matter.
Warner Bros. Discovery owns streaming services, linear cable networks, a movie studio, a TV production studio and digital properties. It owns DC Comics, HBO, CNN, Bleacher Report, and oodles of reality TV programming. It has sports rights both internationally and domestically, including the NBA on TNT.
Zaslav hopes his reconstruction of Warner Bros. Discovery will deliver two results. First, it will showcase the company as a fully diversified content machine, featuring top brands and intellectual property in prestige TV (HBO), movies (Warner Bros.), reality TV (Discovery), kids and superheroes (Looney Tunes, DC), news (CNN) and sports (NBA, NCAA March Madness).
Liberty Media’s John Malone
Michael Kovac | Getty Images
Second, he wants it to prove that a modern media company that’s spending billions on streaming video can also generate billions in cash flow. The company has estimated 2023 EBITDA will be $12 billion. Warner Bros. Discovery will generate more than $3 billion in free cash flow this year, about $4 billion next year and close to $6 billion in free cash flow in 2024, according to company forecasts.
That would give Zaslav a selling point to investors compared to other legacy media companies. Disney has generated just $1 billion of free cash flow over the past 12 months and analysts estimate the company will have about $2 billion in 2023. That’s despite growing Disney+, its flagship streaming service, by 46 million subscribers during the period and owning a theme park business that generated $28.7 billion in revenue for the fiscal year — up 73% from a year earlier.
The low free cash flow relates largely to the money drain from streaming services and Disney’s large investments in theme parks. Over the past 12 months, Disney had $4.2 billion in operating income from its media properties, down 42% from a year ago. Returning Disney CEO Bob Iger said in a town hall last month he will prioritize profitability over streaming growth — a change from when he left the post in 2020. Outgoing boss Bob Chapek put into place a Dec. 8 price hike for Disney+ and other streaming services to accelerate cash flow.
“Discovery was a free cash flow machine,” Zaslav said earlier this year of his former company, which he ran for more than 15 years before merging it with WarnerMedia. “We were generating over $3 billion in free cash flow for a long time. Now, we look at Warner generating $40 billion of revenue and almost no free cash flow, with all of the great IP that they have.”
A year later, Zaslav isn’t the king. In fact, many consider him a villain.
It turned out Zaslav’s top priority as CEO of a large public company wasn’t to win over Hollywood. Rather, it was to convince investors his company could survive and flourish as a relative minnow against much larger sharks, including Apple,Amazon, Disney and Netflix, in an entertainment world that’s quickly moving to digital distribution.
Zaslav’s focus on investors before Hollywood makes business sense. The company must be financially sound before it can make big investments. But he’s taken a hit, reputationally, with some in the creative community.
“HBO Max is widely acknowledged to be the best streaming service. And now the execs who bought it are on the verge of dismantling it, simply because they feel like it,” tweeted Adam Conover, the creator and host of “The G Word” on Netflix and “Adam Ruins Everything” on HBO Max, in August. “Mergers give just a few wealthy people MASSIVE control over what we watch, with disastrous results.”
One Hollywood insider who met with Zaslav to give him advice before he stepped into the job said the Warner Bros. Discovery CEO has ignored 90% of his advice on how to manage the business.
Zaslav can counter that Warner Bros. Discovery hasn’t decreased content spending. The company spent about $22 billion on programming in 2022. But he’s also made cost consciousness a point of pride.
“We’re going to spend more on content — but you’re not going to see us come in and go, ‘Alright, we’re going to spend $5 billion more,'” Zaslav said in February. “We’re going to be measured, we’re going to be smart and we’re going to be careful.”
The company’s content decisions have been based on strategic corrections, such as eliminating made-for-streaming movies and cutting back on kids and family programming that don’t materially entice new subscribers or hold existing ones, executives determined. Warner Bros. Discovery’s HBO continues to churn out hits, including “White Lotus,” “Euphoria,” “House of the Dragon” and “Succession,” under the leadership of Casey Bloys.
V Anderson | WireImage | Getty Images
‘We don’t have to have the NBA’
Perhaps Zaslav’s biggest dilemma is what to do with the NBA.
Like other media companies, Warner Bros. Discovery rents the rights to carry games and pays billions to leagues for the privilege. Warner Bros. Discovery currently pays around $1.2 billion per year to put NBA games on TNT. In 2014, the last time the league struck a deal with TNT and Disney’s ESPN, carriage rights rose from $930 million to $2.6 billion per year.
Negotiations to renew TNT’s NBA rights will begin in earnest next year. Zaslav has said he has little interest in paying a huge increase just to carry games again on cable networks — a platform that loses millions of subscribers each year.
“We don’t have to have the NBA,” Zaslav said Nov. 15 at an investor conference. “With sport, we’re a renter. That’s not as good of a business.”
The problem for Zaslav is keeping legacy pay TV afloat may be his best way to keep cash flow coming, and putting NBA games on TNT may be his best chance to do that. In the third quarter, Warner Bros. Discovery’s cable network business had adjusted EBITDA of $2.6 billion on $5.2 billion of revenue. That’s compared with a direct-to-consumer business that lost $634 million.
If Warner Bros. Discovery is going to pay billions of dollars a year for the NBA, Zaslav wants a deal to be future-focused. He has the luxury of having NBA Commissioner Adam Silver’s ear for the next three years because the NBA will be on TNT through the end of the 2024-25 season.
“If we do a deal on the NBA, it’s going to look a lot different,” Zaslav said.
Charles Barkley on Inside the NBA
Source: NBA on TNT
Warner Bros. Discovery knows how to produce NBA games and airs a studio show, “Inside the NBA,” which is widely regarded as the best in professional sports. It’s possible Zaslav could strike a deal with another bidder, such as Amazon or Apple, which may allow Warner Bros. Discovery to produce their games while giving him a package of games that came with a lower price tag.
Ideally, Zaslav would like to do sports deals that include ownership of intellectual property. This is also appealing to Netflix, The Wall Street Journal reported last month. Acquiring leagues gets Zaslav out of the rental business. But while smaller professional sports leagues, such as Formula One and UFC, are owned by media companies (Malone’s Liberty Media and Ari Emanuel’s Endeavor, respectively), it seems unlikely NBA owners would agree to sell Warner Bros. Discovery a stake in the league.
Silver said last month at the SBJ Dealmakers Conference he was open to rights deals structured in novel ways.
“We’re in the enviable position right now of letting the marketplace work its magic a little bit, you know, to see where the best ideas are going to come from, what’s going to drive the best value,” Silver said.
It’s also possible Zaslav could walk away from the NBA completely. While “Inside the NBA” co-host Charles Barkley recently signed a 10-year contract to stay with Warner Bros. Discovery, it includes an out clause if Zaslav doesn’t re-up the NBA, according to The New York Post.
Live sports aren’t necessarily essential to most streaming services’ success. Netflix, Disney+ and HBO Max all have zero live sports — at least for now.
The one certainty is Zaslav’s decision will be squarely based on how a deal affects the company’s free cash flow.
“It’s how much do we make on the sport?” Zaslav said. “When I was at NBC, when we lost football [in 1998], we lost the promotion of the NFL, which was a huge issue. Then you have the overall asset value without the sport. So you have to evaluate all that.”
WATCH: John Malone on streaming platform distinctions
Spotify said Monday it paid more than $100 million to podcast publishers and podcasters worldwide in the first quarter of 2025.
The figure includes all creators on the platform across all formats and agreements, including the platform’s biggest fish, Joe Rogan, Alex Cooper and Theo Von, the company said.
Rogan, host of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Cooper of “Call Her Daddy” and “This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von” were among the top podcasts on Spotify globally in 2024.
Rogan and Cooper’s exclusivity deals with Spotify have ended, and while Rogan signed a new Spotify deal last year worth up to $250 million, including revenue sharing and the ability to post on YouTube, Cooper inked a SiriusXM deal in August.
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Even when shows are no longer exclusive to Spotify, they are still uploaded to the platform and qualify for the Spotify Partner Program, which launched in January in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia.
The program allows creators to earn revenue every time an ad monetized by Spotify plays in the episode, as well as revenue when Premium subscribers watch dynamic ads on videos.
Competing platform Patreon said it paid out over $472 million to podcasters from over 6.7 million paid memberships in 2024.
YouTube’s payouts are massive by comparison but include more than just podcasts. The company said it paid $70 billion to creators between 2021 and 2024 with payouts rising each year, according to YouTube CEO Neal Mohan.
Spotify reports first-quarter earnings on Tuesday.
The deal is set to close by the first quarter of fiscal year 2026.
“By extending our AI security capabilities to include Protect AI’s innovative solutions for Securing for AI, businesses will be able to build AI applications with comprehensive security,” said Anand Oswal, senior vice president and general manager of network security at Palo Alto Networks, in a release.
Palo Alto has been steadily bolstering its artificial intelligence systems to confront increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. The use of rapidly built ecosystems of AI models by large enterprises and government organizations has created new vulnerabilities. The company said those risks require purpose-built defenses beyond conventional cybersecurity.
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The acquisition would fold Protect AI’s solutions and team into Palo Alto’s newly announced Prisma AIRS platform. Palo Alto said Protect AI has established itself as a key player in what it called a “critical new area of security.”
Protect AI’s CEO Ian Swanson said joining Palo Alto would allow the company to “scale our mission of making the AI landscape more secure for users and organizations of all sizes.”
The company’s stock price is up 23% in the past year lifting its market cap close to $120 billion. Palo Alto reports third-quarter earnings on May 21.
From left, Veza founders Rob Whitcher, Tarun Thakur and Maohua Lu.
Veza
Tech giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Nvidia have captured headlines in recent years for their massive investments in artificial intelligence startups like OpenAI and Anthropic.
But when it comes to corporate investing by tech companies, cloud software vendors are getting aggressive as well. And in some cases they’re banding together.
Veza, whose software helps companies manage the various internal technologies that employees can access, has just raised $108 million in a financing round that included participation from software vendors Atlassian, Snowflake and Workday.
New Enterprise Associates led the round, which values Veza at just over $800 million, including the fresh capital.
For two years, Snowflake’s managers have used Veza to check who has read and write access, Harsha Kapre, director of the data analytics software company’s venture group told CNBC. It sits alongside a host of other cloud solutions the company uses.
“We have Workday, we have Salesforce — we have all these things,” Kapre said. “What Veza really unlocks for us is understanding who has access and determining who should have access.”
Kapre said that “over-provisioning,” or allowing too many people access to too much stuff, “raises the odds of an attack, because there’s just a lot of stuff that no one is even paying attention to.”
With Veza, administrators can check which employees and automated accounts have authorization to see corporate data, while managing policies for new hires and departures. Managers can approve or reject existing permissions in the software.
Veza says it has built hooks into more than 250 technologies, including Snowflake.
The funding lands at a challenging time for traditional venture firms. Since inflation started soaring in late 2021 and was followed by rising interest rates, startup exits have cooled dramatically, meaning venture firms are struggling to generate returns.
Wall Street was banking on a revival in the initial public offering market with President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, but the president’s sweeping tariff proposals led several companies to delay their offerings.
That all means startup investors have to preserve their cash as well.
In the first quarter, venture firms made 7,551 deals, down from more than 11,000 in the same quarter a year ago, according to a report from researcher PitchBook.
Corporate venture operates differently as the capital comes from the parent company and many investments are strategic, not just about generating financial returns.
Atlassian’s standard agreement asks that portfolio companies disclose each quarter the percentage of a startup’s customers that integrate with Atlassian. Snowflake looks at how much extra product consumption of its own technology occurs as a result of its startup investments, Kapre said, adding that the company has increased its pace of deal-making in the past year.
‘Sleeping industry’
Within the tech startup world, Veza is also in a relatively advantageous spot, because the proliferation of cyberattacks has lifted the importance of next-generation security software.
Veza’s technology runs across a variety of security areas tied to identity and access. In access management, Microsoft is the leader, and Okta is the challenger. Veza isn’t directly competing there, and is instead focused on visibility, an area where other players in and around the space lack technology, said Brian Guthrie, an analyst at Gartner.
Tarun Thakur, Veza’s co-founder and CEO, said his company’s software has become a key part of the ecosystem as other security vendors have started seeing permissions and entitlements as a place to gain broad access to corporate networks.
“We have woken up a sleeping industry,” Thakur, who helped start the company in 2020, said in an interview.
Thakur’s home in Los Gatos, California, doubles as headquarters for the startup, which employs 200 people. It isn’t disclosing revenue figures but says sales more than doubled in the fiscal year that ended in January. Customers include AMD, CrowdStrike and Intuit.
Guthrie said enterprises started recognizing that they needed stronger visibility about two years ago.
“I think it’s because of the number of identities,” he said. Companies realized they had an audit problem or “an account that got compromised,” Guthrie said.
AI agents create a new challenge. Last week Microsoft published a report that advised organizations to figure out the proper ratio of agents to humans.
Veza is building enhancements to enable richer support for agent identities, Thakur said. The new funding will also help Veza expand in the U.S. government and internationally and build more integrations, he said.
Peter Lenke, head of Atlassian’s venture arm, said his company isn’t yet a paying Veza client.
“There’s always potential down the road,” he said. Lenke said he heard about Veza from another investor well before the new round and decided to pursue a stake when the opportunity arose.
Lenke said that startups benefit from Atlassian investments because the company “has a large footprint” inside of enterprises.
“I think there’s a great symbiotic match there,” he said.