Word: acquisitor
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Antipodal Acquisitor. In 1983, in the midst of his glory days, Alan Bond's sloop Australia II captured the America's Cup. In the same determined manner, Bond, 51, has run up more than $3 billion of debt in recent years while capturing a global empire of properties ranging from half of Chile's telephone system to Wisconsin-based G. Heileman Brewing. To lighten his crushing debt load, Bond is now shedding properties almost as fast as he acquired them...
Corporate Raider T. Boone Pickens of Texas has long argued that his takeover forays are in the best interest of small shareholders. Now Pickens has a lobbying organization to help him defend that proposition. Last week in Washington, the wily acquisitor unveiled the nonprofit United Shareholders Association. The group's first goal: a "one share, one vote" rule that would hinder corporate managers from foiling takeover proposals that come up for stockholder votes. At many firms, management-controlled ballots carry more weight than an equal number of votes controlled by those of small stockholders. Said Pickens: "Shareholders are treated like...
...many economists, who argue that takeovers and mergers help to make businesses more efficient. The threat of a takeover can be an effective way of dislodging inept managers. To Carl Icahn, the typical chief executive is merely "a nice guy, a good drinking buddy." Sir James Goldsmith, a feared acquisitor who gained control of the Crown Zellerbach paper company last summer, told Congress that he has freed firms from "the dead hand of the bureaucrat" who produced only "complacency, ossification and decline...
Presidential Contender Walter Mondale, the grand acquisitor of political endorsements, publicly spurns his most passionate devotees. Across this land some 10 million cigar smokers yearn for a front-page picture of Mondale, the only dedicated cigar smoker among the Democratic contenders, with his Punch panatela at a defiant angle. Or maybe 30 seconds on Tom Brokaw's news, showing a sweet cloud of Partagas No. 1 smoke carrying off the burdens of another campaign...
When Murdoch bought 7% of Warner's stock last month for $98 million, he insisted that it was only an "investment." But that claim sounded suspicious coming from a grand acquisitor. Murdoch has already bought the New York Post (for $30 million), the Boston Herald ($1 million plus a share of future profits) and the Chicago Sun-Times ($90 million) and established a sprawling publishing empire with assets of $1.5 billion that now includes more than 80 newspapers and magazines in the U.S., Britain and Australia. Wall Street immediately began to wonder if Murdoch wanted to charge into...