Samuel A. Di Piazza Jr.

Di Piazza is one of the few board chairs in U.S. media whose authority predates the company he now chairs: he sat on AT&T’s board through the long arc of the Time Warner acquisition, the WarnerMedia integration, and the eventual decision to spin the asset back out — then stepped across the deal table to chair the merged entity at close. That continuity is the reason his name keeps surfacing as Warner Bros. Discovery navigates the Paramount Skydance acquisition: the chair who oversaw the unwinding of the AT&T era is also the one signing off on what comes next.

His résumé sits unusually far outside the media-operator template that dominates most studio boards. Three decades-plus at PricewaterhouseCoopers, six of them as global CEO, plus a Citigroup vice chairmanship — the profile is audit, governance, and global capital, not programming or distribution. For a board navigating a contested sale process, that’s the point.