Discovery-Warnermedia Merger Hatched Over Golf(ish)

As if the ego maniacal types congregating at each February’s AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am needed inflated sense of self, the megamerger of WarnerMedia and Discovery had origins in golf.

According to the New York Times’ Edmund Lee and John Koblin, Discovery CEO David Zaslav initiated the talks and it was always only a conversation with WarnerMedia.

Mr. Zaslav expected to meet with AT&T’s chief executive, John Stankey, at the Pebble Beach Pro-Am golf tournament in February, but both had stayed home because of the pandemic. Instead, Mr. Zaslav sent an email to Mr. Stankey as he was watching the golf tournament on TV to discuss a possible deal.

“You around?” Mr. Zaslav said he wrote to Mr. Stankey. “I have an idea.” He added some emoji flair to his signoff with several 🏌🏻and one 😎.

Mr. Zaslav said the note kicked off a conversation that lasted several hours. Later, the two met several times “secretly from my brownstone in Greenwich Village,” Mr. Zaslav said.

Met secretly at my home would have sufficed.