For the first time since the 1960s, both the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) are on strike, holding out for better pay, increased job security, and guardrails on the use of AI, among other things. Neither actors nor writers are working right now, effectively bringing all major TV and film production to a halt, with some exceptions.
In her speech announcing the strike, SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher, The Nanny herself, pointed to exorbitant CEO pay as evidence the studios could, if they wanted, pay actors better. “I am shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us,” she said. “I cannot believe it, quite frankly, how far apart we are on so many things, how they plead poverty, that they’re losing money left and right while giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs. It is disgusting. Shame on them. They stand on the wrong side of history at this very moment.”
As the strikes drag on — the actors have been on the picket lines for three weeks and the writers for three months — I wanted to look at that point: how much do these CEOs get paid, is it justified, and would reducing that pay help free up money to pay other people in the industry? To that end, let’s take a tour of some of the best-paid people in the entertainment business, and indeed the world, starting with the guy on top of the mountain:
David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery
According to an analysis by the Los Angeles Times, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav made $498,915,318 over a period of five years, from 2018 to 2022. That’s half a billion in half a decade. I think it’s kind of hard for a lot of people to get their heads around what it means for one person to have that much money. Like, what do they even do with half a billion dollars?
Putting existential questions aside, let’s focus on 2021, the year before Warner Bros. and Discovery merged into one. That’s when Zaslav got his biggest payday: $246 million.
Breaking it down further with an assist from Deadline, in 2021, Zaslav was paid a base salary of $3 million. On top of that he got a stock award of $13 million, and non-equity incentive plan compensation (which is corporate speak for a bonus, basically) of $22 million.
The biggest chunk came in the form of a $202 million option grant. This money wasn’t given to Zaslav in a lump sum like much of the rest. Instead, he gets the $202 million if, over the years when he’s managing the studio, the stock hits a certain point. It’s possible that Zaslav will never see this money, meaning that he’ll only have received some $38 million in the year 2021. Who will water the plants on his private island then?
I’m not a financial expert, but you don’t have to get the math exactly right to know that Zaslav received a f**k-ton of money in 2021, even if the option grant is contingent on future events. Speaking of the option grant, the idea behind it is that it will incentivize Zaslav to get the company stock to rise, which is his job. I’d like us all to pause and think about that. David Zaslav, in the year 2021, was paid some $38 million up front. Then, in order to make sure he does good work, he was promised an additional $202 million pending the company’s stock hitting certain targets. This boggles my brain a bit, because is $38 million in salary and bonuses not enough of an incentive to do a good job?
The executive team at Warner Bros. made out very well in 2021, too. CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels got $11.3 million; Chief Development, Distribution and Legal Officer Bruce Campbell got $12.6 million; Chief Corporate Operating Officer David Leavy got $6.4 million; and President and CEO of Discovery International Jean-Briac Perrette got $13.4 million. As we take a look at our next high-roller, keep in mind that it’s not just the guy in charge who takes home exorbitant amounts of money, but a whole group of people at the top.
Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos, leaders of Netflix
We have a two-fer here. Reed Hastings is the co-founder and executive chairman at Netflix, while Ted Sarandos serves as co-CEO alongside Greg Peters. Over the five years from 2018 to 2022, Reed Hastings received $209 million in compensation while Ted Sarandos received $192 million.
Let’s drill down on one year in particular. According to Variety, Hastings received $51.07 million in 2022, $49.4 million of which was in stock option awards. Sarandos got $50.3 million, which included a $20 million base salary, $28.5 million in stock options and $1.79 million in “other compensation.” That other compensation included $1.43 million in “residential security costs,” which I suppose means Netflix was paying for private guards for his home? Not sure.
Meanwhile, co-CEO Greg Peters took home $28.1 million in 2022; in 2023, he’s expected to bring home $34 million. And remember, there’s always a gaggle of additional execs getting paid like this at the top of these companies. In 2023, Netflix CFO Spencer Neumann is supposed to receive $14 million, chief legal officer David Hyman $11 million and chief communications officer Rachel Whetstone $6.5 million.
Speaking of 2023, the top brass at Netflix actually got some pushback from their shareholders when they proposed their new pay packages. In June, shareholders voted not to approve these packages, reasoning that Netflix had lost subscribers for the first time in years in 2022 and that the writers strike could disrupt business. Why, the shareholders reasoned, should they reward this performance with tens of millions of dollars paid to a small group of executives?
But the vote was non-binding. According to CNN Business, the Netflix board can disregard the wishes of the shareholders and approve the pay packages anyway. As of this June, they’ve unanimously recommended to do just that.
There are 10 people on the board at Netflix. I don’t know the nature of the relationships between each board member and the executives on whose pay they’re voting, but if the board is willing to unanimously recommend approving voluminous pay packages despite the objections of shareholders even when the company is bleeding subscribers, it seems like their function is to rubber-stamp decisions already made by the leaders.
So basically, the top-level executives can decide that they should be paid tens of millions of dollars per year, and then receive that money even if the company is hitting a rough spot or their own shareholders object. Smells like a conflict of interest to me.
I’ll give the final word on Netflix to WGA West president Meredith Stiehm: “While investors have long taken issue with Netflix’s executive pay, the compensation structure is more egregious against the backdrop of the strike,” she wrote in a letter to Netflix shareholders. And to paraphrase, ‘If Netflix can afford to spend an estimated $166 million on executive compensation, it should also be able to pay the estimated $68 million that writers are seeking in their contract negotiations.’
Bob Iger, CEO of Disney
We can’t have a list of extravagantly paid executives without mentioning Disney. CEO Bob Iger has received $195 million in the last five years. And he left the company for most of 2022, during which time he was replaced by Bob Chapek. That didn’t last, and Iger was reinstated last November.
According to Variety, Iger took home $46 million in 2021; that includes a base salary of $3 million and a cash bonus of $23 million. Now that Iger is back at the company after being away for about a year, he has to start at the bottom with a meager base salary of $1 million, plus a $1 million bonus and an additional amount of money up to $25 million if Disney stock hits certain benchmarks. You’ve gotta start somewhere.
Rupert and Lachlan Murdock, leaders of Fox Corp
Rupert Murdock is the chairman of Fox Corp, which includes Fox News Media, Fox Sports and the Fox broadcast network. He’s also the chairman of News Corp, which owns outlets like The Wall Street Journal. His son Lachlan Murdoch is Fox’s executive chairman and CEO. Rupert Murdoch received $175 million over the past five years while Lachlan Murdock received $171 million.
The Murdocks have actually had their pay reduced in recent years. In 2021, Rupert received $31 million and Lachlan $28 million. But in 2022, they received $18 million and $22 million respectively. According to The Hollywood Reporter, this was due in part to cuts in non-equity incentive plan compensation, which I remind you is a wordy way of saying “bonuses.” For both Murdochs, they went from getting $10.5 million apiece in bonuses to $6.3 million.
Fun fact: the Murdoch family is often cited as one of the main inspirations behind the money-obsessed monster people on the HBO show Succession. Go figure.
Joseph Ianniello, former CEO of CBS
Here’s a bit of a weird one. Joseph Ianniello made $153 million in the past five years, and he got most of it because he stopped being CEO.
Ianniello was the CEO of CBS when it was about to merge with Viacom to become ViacomCBS, also known as Paramount Global. Why is a company formed by merging CBS with Viacom named Paramount Global? Because the corporate world makes no sense; just look at how much they pay their executives. Anyway, according to THR, Ianniello’s contract stipulated that he would be in line for a bonus if he wasn’t made the CEO of the newly formed company. That honor eventually went to Bob Bakish. So Ianniello left the company, and was paid $125 million on the way out.
That’s right: Ianniello was paid over $100 million to leave a job. And this after he’d already made millions and will go to make millions more. He’s currently the CEO of Argus Capital Corp, where he can make obscene amounts of money without having to deal with any of that showbiz stuff.
Alright, so we’ve seen how much some of the top executives in the industry are pulling down. Are the actors and writers correct that they’re getting paid too much, and could reducing some of those paydays help address their concerns?
The gap between CEOs and workers is stupidly huge and should shrink by a whole freaking lot
According to the Economic Policy Institute, in 1965, the typical CEO made around 21 times as much as the typical worker. So in those days, let’s say you were making $50k a year working at a big company like Disney. The CEO would be making just over $1 million per year. That’s a pretty big spread, but the CEO is making a lot of important, top-level decisions. I wouldn’t say it’s an absurd difference.
Fast-forward to 2020, and the typical CEO is now making 351 times as much as a typical worker. So if you’re making $50k, your CEO is making closer to $18 million, and as we’ve seen from the guys above, it can get a lot higher than that.
How did the gap between CEO pay and pay for ordinary workers in the U.S. grow so wide? It’s a long story involving the economic policies enacted under the presidency of Ronald Reagan and the innovations of corporate ghouls like Jack Welch, but the point is that it’s real, and it’s a problem.
What is the point of money? What is the point of having an economy? Answers will vary, but if you ask me, an economy exists to provide people with the means to live their lives. That means being able to do things like buy a home, go to school, raise children and maybe even take a vacation every now and then, all of which have become harder to afford as more money is concentrated at the top of the income distribution. Because make no mistake: the more money that’s hoarded at the top, the less there is to go around for everyone else.
The EPI report puts it pretty succinctly:
"Exorbitant CEO pay is a major contributor to rising inequality that we could safely do away with. …This escalation of CEO compensation, and of executive compensation more generally, has fueled the growth of top 1.0% and top 0.1% incomes, leaving less of the fruits of economic growth for ordinary workers and widening the gap between very high earners and the bottom 90%. The economy would suffer no harm if CEOs were paid less (or were taxed more)."
Big money, bad business
So let’s return to our central question: Is it reasonable to pay CEOs in the entertainment industry this much money? Very obviously no. Executive pay at major studios is laughably, ludicrously unjustifiable, and slashing it would free up money to pay workers who need it.
We haven’t talked about how much ordinary actors and writers are getting. It tells you a lot that of the 160,000 actors who are part of SAG-AFTRA, only 12.7% make the $26,470 per year necessary to quality for the union’s health insurance plan, according to CNN Business. The strikes aren’t about writers like Ryan Murphy or actors like the Rock, who made $270 million in 2022; the Rock is as overpaid as any of the executives above, and in a just world his intake would be vastly reduced. This is more about writers like Molly Nussbaum, who was an executive producer on the Netflix show The Umbrella Academy but still had to drive Lyft to make ends meet.
And just to be clear, I’m not saying that executives should make the same as mailroom attendants or that the Rock should be paid the same as an extra. Obviously the star of a movie should make more money than a supporting actor. Obviously CEOs should make more than their assistants. It’s more that the difference between the two extremes has gotten dramatically out of control in a way that isn’t good for the studios, the workers, or the industry in general. The only people benefiting are the CEOs.
Take the case of David Zaslav making $246 million in one year. For context, the budgets of Barbie and Oppenheimer, two huge box office hits, are $140 million and $100 million respectively. So it took $240 million to make these two movies, and they employ hundreds of people. Instead of using that kind of money to make more potential hits, Warner Bros. Discovery gave it to one guy, in one year.
Honestly, I think this is terrible business. If studios want to make money, wouldn’t it make more sense to use their resources to create things people will pay to see, rather than shower a coterie of executives with hundreds of millions of dollars? But of course, as we saw with the Netflix executives, these people basically have the power to pay themselves, and they tend to want to pay themselves as much as possible.
When people are confronted with this kind of staggering inequality, I feel like it’s easy to throw up your hands and say, “Nothing can be done about it. That’s just the way it is.” But it’s not the way it always was. There was much more economic parity in the U.S. in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, when it was easier for many people (though by no means all) to achieve acceptable levels of economic security. The situation we’re in now changed over the course of many years, and it can change again. And one of the ways to force it to change is through union activity like strikes.
Eventually, I expect the studios to cut deals with both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA. I hope they can reach agreements quickly, because I want to watch TV and movies as much as the next guy. But more than that, I hope the deals are fair. That’s better for everyone in the long run…well, better for everyone except the CEOs, but somehow I think they’ll scrape by.
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