Good afternoon,

I'm William D. Cohan, the author of six books and a former M&A banker. Welcome back to Dry Powder, my private email about what's really happening on Wall Street. If you haven't yet had the chance, you'll need to subscribe to Puck to read my latest column in full.

In the meantime, please enjoy this free preview of Dry Powder, below, on the bildungsroman of David Zaslav, perhaps the last great mogul of the linear television era. What he told me about his tutelage under the legendary Jack Welch may help to explain how he became the architect of one of the most riveting media mergers in decades—and how he plans to turn the Warner Bros.-Discovery combination into a streaming giant to rival Disney and Netflix.

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Portrait of The Zaz as a Young Dealmaker

Decades before he christened the deal of the streaming age, David Zaslav cut his teeth under the tutelage of Jack Welch, Bob Wright and John Malone. The formative years of his career explain as much about the history of cable as they portend about the future of streaming.

Sure, now everyone knows that David Zaslav is one of the most powerful media executives on the planet and the architect of one the most riveting mergers in years—Discovery Communications’s still-pending $43 billion acquisition of WarnerMedia from AT&T—that will transform the media landscape and create a serious rival to Disney and Netflix. But, once upon a time, years before he became C.E.O. of Discovery in 2007 (and one of the world’s highest-paid corporate executives), the Young Zaz was a pioneer in the cable business, and one of the handful of people who recognized early on that television broadcasting—now known as “linear TV”—was dying, and that the future lay not only in cable television but also in creating content for cable television. 

In many ways, the seeds of Zaslav’s immensely successful ascent were planted in 1989, when he arrived at NBC, then owned by GE. The Zaz wasn’t one of the Ivy League blue bloods who dominated the joint. Born in Brooklyn in 1960, Zaslav was raised mostly in Rockland County, New York. After graduating from SUNY-Binghamton and the Boston University School of Law, in 1985, he headed to the law firm LeBoeuf Lamb. Four years later, he moved to NBC and GE, working for Bob Wright, then the head of NBC after stints running GE Capital and Cox Cable, in Atlanta, and for Tom Rogers, another cable pioneer at NBC whom Wright had hired away from Washington, where he had been a longtime legislative aide to Tim Wirth, a Colorado congressman who was the chair of the Telecommunications Subcommittee. This immensely successful partnership—Wright, Rogers and Zaslav—created CNBC and MSNBC, the juggernauts that we now take for granted, among other cable channels. And for Zazlav, at least, it’s a largely untold story that says as much about the history of cable as it does portend the future.

It all started after the stock-market bubble popped in October 1987 and a general malaise had settled on Wall Street, following years of euphoria. (Sound familiar?) In January 1989, NBC paid $140 million for a half stake in Chuck Dolan’s Rainbow Properties, which owned cable channels Bravo, American Movie Classics, and several sports-related cable channels. NBC also bought stakes in CourtTV and the History Channel. At that time, no other broadcaster aside from NBC had stakes in cable channels. Jack Welch, the strong-willed chairman and C.E.O. of GE, was convinced that the future of television broadcasting lay in cable. “I don’t care if we lose money,” Welch told Zaslav at the time. “We have to learn about this business. This is the future.”

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