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The Zaz Age

As Gunnar Wiedenfels licks his chops over the debt-reduction possibilities at his cable-asset-heavy RemainCo, it’s time to contemplate the possibilities for Zaz’s Streaming & Studios venture. Is a 13x EBITDA multiple possible? If so, could this business kiss a $40 billion market cap, which is nearly twice the value of WBD?

David Zaslav
Zaz traded up from Discovery Communications’ relatively forlorn cable TV portfolio, to WBD, and now to a fiefdom of some of the sexiest media assets on the planet—HBO, the Warner Bros. movie studio, and the Warner Bros. TV production business—and a relatively manageable amount of debt. Photo: Mustafa Yalcin/Anadolu/Getty Images
William D. Cohan
June 15, 2025

While the equity markets continue to process David Zaslav’s announcement that he’s splitting Warner Bros. Discovery into two publicly traded companies—a declining linear television business, run by Gunnar Wiedenfels, known for now as Global Networks, and a Zaz-led, debt-lite, growing, Streaming & Studios business—our friend Rich Greenfield at LightShed Partners offered a few interesting points. First, in his June 11 note, he correctly recalled the original sin of the whole affair: When Zaz closed the deal in April 2022, he guided Wall Street to expect 2023 EBITDA of $14 billion. That initial estimate was lowered to between $10.5 billion and $11 billion, but the actual adjusted EBITDA—don’t do this shit to me on Father’s Day—ended up at $10.2 billion. It’s been downhill from there, with $9 billion in adjusted EBITDA for 2024, and what seemed to be a gathering consensus that it would be stuck at $9 billion for the foreseeable future, absent a spin or split.