David Zaslav's Shaky Hollywood Empire

In a declining industry, the Warner Bros. chief has defied the odds-for now, anyway-based on an unlikely set of skills.

- Michael Wolff

DAVID ZASLAV IS a member of a regular Zoom call that includes Howard Stringer, 83, who once ran Sony; Tom Freston, 79, who once ran Viacom; Walter Isaacson, 72, who once ran CNN and Time magazine; Graydon Carter, 75, who once ran Vanity Fair; Richard Cohen, 84, retired from his longtime column at the Washington Post; Nick Pileggi, 92, the GoodFellas screenwriter; Ken Auletta, 83, the Boswell to a former generation of media moguls; and Kenny Lerer, 73, the financial backer and co-founder of the Huffington Post, now retired from his investment business.

At 65, Zaslav, currently the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, is the youngest person on the call.

The group has met in some form and with a shifting cast for many years. At Zaslav's suggestion, it solidified into quite a defined club and a regular appointment during coVID-10 a.m. every Friday. Health issues form a subtext here; though, given that these are all men of a certain age and sensibility, the full details of, for instance, their trips to the Mayo Clinic might not be directly addressed.

It is a social gathering, "shooting the shit," in one member's more or less humble brag, "kibitzing" among men who have known the same people and shared much the same professional dramas over decades.

But the impossible-to-ignore frisson of the group is that while few members, if any, in the characterization of one of them, "get up in the morning anymore and go to the office," or indeed have formal jobs of any sort, David Zaslav, whose ear they have, holds a significant share of the remaining power of the once all-powerful media business-their business. He is in a sense the last member of this generation to have his hand firmly on the wheel (74-year-old Bob Iger, at Disney, is always on the cusp of retirement) and, for the others in the group, their last brush with the era of the mogul, such as it remains, the age in which they grew up.