# WarnerMedia - Discovery Merger In April 2022, [[AT&T]] spun off [[WarnerMedia]] and merged it with Discovery, Inc. in a ~$43 billion Reverse Morris Trust transaction that created **[[Warner Bros. Discovery]]**, with Discovery's [[David Zaslav]] as CEO. AT&T shareholders received 71% of the new company; Discovery holders 29%. The deal ended AT&T's brief, debt-laden ownership of [[CNN]] and the Warner assets it had bought only four years earlier as [[Time Warner]]. WBD launched saddled with ~$43 billion in debt — the pressure that drove Zaslav's aggressive cost-cutting, the troubled [[Chris Licht]] CNN experiment, and ultimately the 2026 sale to [[Skydance-Paramount]]. See: [[CNN and Warner Bros. Discovery Timeline]], [[Media Consolidation]]