On Monday morning, roughly three weeks after bringing Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery together under the Skydance roof, David Ellison and co-chief executive Ynon Kreiz sent a memo to staffers across the sprawling company. In it, the duo delivered two significant pieces of news to the workforce. First, Ellison and Kreiz championed "in-person collaboration," declaring it "vital to our culture and to the success of our business," and thus mandating that employees report to the office five days a week. Of course, such return-to-office mandates are really just thinly veiled efforts to thin the ranks, and it was then predictably followed by a second announcement: buyouts.
"As we bring our teams together, we recognize that not everyone will see their future here, and we respect that," Ellison and Kreiz wrote. "To give eligible employees the option to move on in a way that works for them, we are introducing a Voluntary Buyout (VBO) Program."
Shortly after Ellison and Kreiz's email landed in inboxes, leaders of Skydance's respective news divisions sent follow-up messages to their understandably anxious employees. But notably, the approach taken by CNN boss Mark Thompson stood in stark contrast to that of CBS News chiefs Bari Weiss and Tom Cibrowski, according to copies of the memos obtained by Status. The contrasting approaches not only hinted at the different management styles of Thompson and Weiss, but also, perhaps, offered some clues about Skydance's priorities…
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