Paramount Skydance Corporation (NASDAQ: PSKY) disclosed in an SEC filing Friday that CEO David Ellison earned $63.2 million in 2025 and departing president Jeff Shell earned $60.7 million, one business day after Warner Bros. Discovery (NASDAQ: WBD) shareholders refused on an advisory vote to bless CEO David Zaslav’s roughly $886 million merger-related compensation package.
Both Ellison and Shell received an identical $58.7 million stock award, per the same filing, with the rest of each package made up of pro-rated salary, cash bonus, and other compensation tied to the August 7, 2025 close of the Skydance-Paramount transaction. Shell, who departed earlier this month amid a breach-of-contract lawsuit filed against him, received severance terms providing $3.5 million in annual base and $1.5 million in target bonus eligibility for 12 months post-exit.
The PSKY disclosure follows WBD shareholders’ April 23 vote, in which 1,444,387,748 shares opposed the Zaslav package against 307,742,302 in favor (roughly 82% against), as detailed in our coverage of the special meeting. The advisory vote does not bind the WBD board, which has not publicly indicated whether it will pay or modify the package. Institutional Shareholder Services called the structure “extraordinary,” “problematic,” and “inconsistent with common market practice,” and Glass Lewis flagged its tax reimbursement as “a considerable and unnecessary cost to shareholders,” TheWrap reported ahead of the meeting.
The week’s other public-record peg moved on regulatory ground. The UK Competition and Markets Authority opened an invitation-to-comment phase on the merger on April 13, with the public consultation period closing April 27. The CMA was explicit that the step is preliminary: “The CMA has not yet launched its formal investigation into this transaction. This invitation to comment is the first part of the CMA’s information-gathering process.”
What U.S. and UK regulators are now sizing up was quantified in March by Reelgood for Business, whose data analysis by David Markowitz put the combined HBO Max plus Paramount+ catalog at roughly 53,000 content hours against Netflix’s roughly 47,500, and the full Paramount-WBD portfolio including Discovery+ and Pluto TV at roughly 131,000 hours — about 2.8 times Netflix’s U.S. catalog. The CMA’s April 27 close, the WBD board’s pending decision on the Zaslav package, and any first response from Paramount Skydance to the comp vote at the company it is buying are the next triggers.
