Word: belle
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...over the future of the much touted electronic superhighway, which is expected to bring into U.S. homes everything from video games, movies and news on demand to vast video shopping malls. The quest to build this highway has become the great preoccupation of the 1990s, and thus the TCI-Bell Atlantic breakup had a global resonance. The two companies combined would have been the single biggest highway builder, expecting to spend as much as $20 billion over five years toward the construction of an interactive system for American homes...
...merger had been tottering for weeks. Three deadlines for a definitive agreement had already come and gone. The big problem was the slumping value of Bell Atlantic stock, which had dropped from 67 5/8 on Oct. 14 to 52 3/4 the day the deal collapsed. That was uncomfortably below the $54 a share that Bell Atlantic had pledged to pay for TCI. Malone, whose personal stake would have been worth more than $1 billion under the merger agreement, demanded more Bell Atlantic shares to offset the decline in price. But Smith, who noted that issuing more stock would dilute...
Smith and Malone had been an odd couple from the start. Smith, 56, an amateur actor and playwright who turned Bell Atlantic into the most venturesome of the seven Baby Bells, had come up through the staid bureaucratic ranks of AT&T before its breakup in 1984. Malone, 52, is a strong-willed, publicity-averse entrepreneur with a Ph.D. in operations research who built the fledgling TCI into the country's largest cable operator, gaining a reputation for ruthlessness along...
Cultural differences between the two companies also aroused a measure of distrust. After the merger agreement in October, Malone presented Bell Atlantic with a list of 23 questions about its management and policymaking methods. Would, for example, the phone company consider cutting its dividend in order to plow more money into capital investment? Bell Atlantic wouldn't hear of it; like other big utilities, the firm considers large and steady dividends to be an important feature of its stock. Smith had at least 40 questions of his own. Could TCI deal with the intense level of regulatory scrutiny that Bell...
...forward with combined ventures of their own. Among them: Time Warner and U.S. West, which last May put up $2.5 billion for a 25% stake in Time Warner Entertainment, a unit of Time Warner that owns, among other things, cable outlets in 36 states. At the same time, Southwestern Bell and Cox Cable have teamed up to develop interactive TV systems of their...