Media CEO Pay Packages in 2024: The Air Up There

The entertainment business has seen better days.

Film and TV production in the U.S. rose 18% last year but lagged 2022 levels, according to ProPro, which tracks studio productions. Theatrical ticket sales fell 3.3% in 2024 and remain nearly 25% down from pre-pandemic levels. Media conglomerates are spinning off cable channels at a dizzying rate, an acknowledgment of the damage that streaming has done to that cash cow. And tech giants like Amazon and Apple, which elbowed into the content business a few years ago, have found that it’s much harder to make a show that people care about than it is to sell them paper towels and iPhones.

Cutbacks and layoffs are the order of the day. Yet for some reason the spirit of economizing didn’t extend to the executive suites. Seven of the 10 CEOs and media barons whose pay packages we examine as part of our annual survey of compensation got raises. And in most cases, the bumps were double-digit ones even though their results were often lackluster at best.

“When the stock is up, CEOs always take credit, but when it plunges, they rarely take responsibility,” says Charles Elson of the University of Delaware’s John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance. “There should be more alignment between pay packages and performance so when there’s a bad year, the CEOs take more of a hit.”

To be fair, some of these executives will end up banking far less than what’s reported. That’s because the stock awards and options represent fair value as of the grant date and do not reflect actual dollar amounts received by executives. If the company’s value shrinks, so does their compensation. Of course, if it increases, their windfall could be even greater than it initially appeared in public filings.

The pay packages may be largely undiminished, but our list of top executives shrank. Paramount Global hoped to have finalized its sale to Skydance Media by now, but the Trump administration and the president’s lawsuit against “60 Minutes” appears to be holding up regulatory approval. Still, Bob Bakish, who left Paramount amid the company’s deal talks with Skydance, has already profited handsomely, earning $87 million last year, which includes $69.3 million in severance. Then there’s Endeavor, which went private again after four years as a publicly traded company. Ari Emanuel, the brash agent who led the company’s whipsaw transformation, got a $173.8 million cash payout from the equity he converted to cash as part of the go-private deal (while also rolling his ownership interests with a total value of $290.3 million into the newly private company, Endeavor Group Holdings).

Paramount Global will likely soon have company, as most industry observers expect that other media companies are looking for buyers (speculation often centers on Warner Bros. Discovery, which has endured two traumatic mergers over the past seven years and formally separated its TV business from its studio and streaming operations). Experts like Elson say companies often have good reasons for selling themselves or acquiring each other. But he also notes that there’s often a strong financial incentive for the people at the top to make these kinds of deals.

“The synergies that come with a merger can be quite helpful, but you have to make sure the cost savings are really there,” he says. “Sometimes these deals are more ego driven and turn out to be disasters.”

Historically, media chieftains are far better compensated than leaders in other industries. Much of that has to do with the ownership structure of entertainment conglomerates such as Comcast and Fox, which have dual-class stock. That gives the families behind them much tighter control, enabling them to reward themselves without risking much interference from average shareholders. This, in turn, skews the pay packages of media companies like Disney and Netflix, which aren’t run by families but justify rewarding their executives with big bonuses and options because they are part of the same peer group. It helps that the boards of these companies are often loaded with sympathetic allies.

“Board members themselves are well paid,” says Rosanna Landis Weaver of shareholder advocacy group As You Sow. “It’s a very cushy gig. And no board member ever got asked to leave for saying, ‘Let’s pay the CEO more.’”

Running a media company requires a very particular set of skills. A successful CEO must be the public face of a corporation — telegenic, amiable, able to work a room — and also serve as an ambassador to Wall Street at a time when investors have grown more skeptical about the long-term health of the entertainment business.

Just look how difficult it was for Bob Chapek, the short-lived CEO of Disney, whose tenure was so rocky that the company reenlisted Bob Iger, the man he succeeded, as his replacement. But if media conglomerates rationalize giving their leaders extravagant pay packages because they’re worried that another company is going to poach them or that they will leave of their own volition, they should probably think again.

“The thing about the media business is that these jobs are fun,” says David L. Yermack, professor of finance at NYU. “You get to have a lot of influence on society, and shaping culture is interesting work. Running a coal mine or being in the utilities business isn’t anywhere near as interesting.”

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Humiliated Lorraine’s absences have ‘become a joke’: Insiders reveal savage story of ITV bloodbath to KATIE HIND, truth about ‘awful’ show and why final blow was so ‘mortifying for Lorraine’

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At the moment when the ITV bosses concluded their emergency summit with the staff this week, during which they were told an imminent blood bath, they asked for only one of those present for an individual meeting.That person, of course, was Lorraine Kelly.After his...