Skydance Corp., the new company formed from David Ellison’s massive Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger, has established the leadership team overseeing financial operations across the business. Ellison and Ynon Kreiz, co-CEO of Skydance, previously announced the senior leadership team for the new company (a day before the deal officially closed).
Since then, different business units and corporate groups have been laying out the new executive teams for the combined Paramount-WBD, which will have annual revenue of nearly $70 billion on a pro-forma basis and net debt of around $80 billion. On Wednesday morning, Skydance CFO Dennis Cinelli (formerly Paramount Skydance’s finance chief) sent a memo to staffers announcing the leadership team for the finance group — which will be intimately involved in trying to help the company achieve its projected $6 billion in annualized cost savings, an exercise set to include what are expected to be several rounds of layoffs. Each of these leaders brings the experience and judgment to help us build something exceptional, and I’m excited to work alongside them and to share where I think we can take this team from here,” Cinelli wrote in the memo, a copy of which was obtained by Variety.
Cinelli thanked employees who “put in extraordinary effort to support the acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery” and said that “your work was essential to getting this deal done.” He also gave a shout-out to the legacy Warner Bros. Discovery finance team, writing that “you kept the business performing through a long period of not knowing how this would end.
That takes discipline, and it didn’t go unnoticed.” He continued, “As you’ve heard David [Ellison] say, our goal is to become the next-generation media and entertainment company. We’ll only get there if Finance operates at the highest level and helps drive the business. Every greenlight decision, technology investment, partnership deal and number reported externally depends on the quality of your work.” According to Cinelli, the new Skydance financial leadership “reflects the strengths of both organizations and puts the right leaders in the right places.” Here’s the structure he outlined in the memo: Business Unit CFOs (dual-reporting to Cinelli and their respective BU heads) In addition to those appointments, Bryon Rubin is stepping out of his role as CFO of TV Media to become COO of Skydance Television.
What we do matters, and how we do it matters even more,” Cinelli wrote in the memo. Cinelli also outlined six “pillars” guiding the finance organization
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