Bosses’ bums remain in the butter
• Hollywood CEOs win big despite their companies’ annus horribilis
As repeatedly reported over the course of the year, 2023 was a difficult year for Hollywood, oft described as an annus horribilis during which profits plummeted and output flatlined as the industry’s big plans for a post-Covid comeback were hamstrung by the effects of the writers’ and actors’ strikes.
The picket lines grew and grew, threatening at one stage to bring about an indefinite halt to production of films and streaming content. The threat to the earnings of media conglomerates was compounded by Wall Street jitters about streaming companies and the fear that the proliferation of services would destroy bottom lines.
Many companies, following the lead of streaming giant Netflix, announced cost-cutting measures that included the retrenchment of thousands of employees, throwing away the slates of many ambitious productions and the cancellation of a plethora of shows, some before they’d even had a chance to be tested with audiences.
You’d expect as many retrenched employees might that the decimating effects of all these factors on profits for media giants would be reflected in reduced pay packets for their CEOs this financial year. After all, the strikers on the picket line reminded us, in the ideal vision of how the relationship between bosses and workers functions, “an injury to one is an injury to all”. Instead, in a disappointingly familiar pattern, Hollywood CEOs did pretty well for themselves in spite of the much reduced profits their companies made.
Disney CEO Bob Iger, who made himself hugely unpopular during the strikes with his assertion that writers and actors were making unrealistic demands that failed to take into account the many pressures facing the industry, saw his 2023 compensation package double to $31.6m, compared with the $54,010 average compensation of those Disney employees who remained after cost-cutting layoffs.
In determining the controversial CEO’s bonus, the Disney board, according to a recent Variety report, “cited Disney’s inclusion in Newsweek’s ‘Most Trustworthy Public Companies’ list” as a motivating factor for his reward. In a supposedly brutal media landscape that Iger cited as reason for his comments about the demands of strikers, it’s easy for many to quip that his payday seems “unrealistic”.
David Zaslav is perhaps an even more controversial figure than Iger. The CEO of Warner Bros Discovery instituted ruthless cost-cutting measures that included job losses; he shelved productions and cancelled shows. His compensation increased by only
26.5% to a modest $49.7m for 2023. Zaslav’s package is 290 times that of the average pay of $171,163 for Warner Bros employees.
At Netflix, shareholders recently issued an advisory note effectively rejecting the proposed executive pay plan, leading to a promise from the streaming giant that it intends to change the way it compensates its execs in the future. Co-CEO Ted Sarandos’ 2023 bonus slipped by 0.9% to $49.8m. His co-CEO, Greg Peters, had a far better year, as his compensation rose by 42.6% to a total of $40.1m not bad for a job he started in only January 2023, after the departure of cofounder Reed Hastings. After a jittery 2022 in which reports of significant shedding of subscribers led to panic stock shedding from investors, the streaming behemoth’s stock bounced back by 65% in 2023. That turned out to be a bonus for its execs, whose percentage of stock performance for their packages increased from 42.5% to 54%.
Even Bob Bakish, who began the year as the president and CEO of Paramount Global and was then kicked out of his job in
April as a result of the machinations involved in the potential sale of the company, managed to end his difficult year with a not too shabby payout of $31.3m. Though the company has yet to finalise a sale, Bakish remains in an advisory role until the end of October, which gives him plenty of time to earn another hefty payout before he disappears.
Few entertainment executives have had as spectacular a year as Ari Emanuel, the CEO of Endeavour, which owns the UFC sporting franchise, which has now merged with wrestling giant WWE to form a new holding company, TKO Group. Emanuel serves as executive chair and CEO of TKO. His total compensation for 2023 worked
out to $83.9m, a whopping 340% increase on the previous year and one that adds up to 1,184 times that of the $70,841 average pay earned by his company’s grunt employees.
Finally, there are the CEOs of two companies that have small interests in streaming but huge interests in other areas that make their companies two of the world’s biggest, most powerful and recognisable brands.
Apple CEO Tim Cook took home $63.2m for 2023, 36% less than the previous year, after shareholders raised concerns about big executive payouts. Apple listened to them and scaled back. It’s a lot less than the almost $100m payouts Cook received in 2021 and 2022 but it’s still nothing to be scoffed at.
All of this may make some people feel as close to sorry as they can manage at the very modest $1.3m made by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. That’s because the company, in spite of reporting an eye-watering $575bn in sales in 2023, has a policy that caps the base pay of its executives at $365,000.
Though he has stock options that would normally earn him a large bonus payout, most of Jassy’s stock only pays out over the course of several years, which means that while his modest compensation for 2023 may make him look good in the eyes of struggling ordinary employees, there will probably come a day in the not too distant future when he’s sitting much higher on the CEO pay list and making them cry foul.
BOB IGER MADE HIMSELF UNPOPULAR BY SAYING WRITERS AND ACTORS MADE UNREALISTIC DEMANDS