Word: bidness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...trying times. Just four months ago, Davis engineered a merger agreement with MTV-owner Viacom Inc. that would have made him chief executive of one of the world's media giants. But Hollywood wizard Barry Diller, who now chairs the QVC home-shopping network, crashed in with a hostile bid for Paramount that triggered the first major takeover battle of the 1990s. Paramount directors spurned Diller at first but endorsed his bid in December after Delaware court rulings compelled them to entertain all offers. The board last week reaffirmed support for Diller's bid, worth about $9.9 billion, vs. Viacom...
...Davis, 66, will soon leave the company he has run successfully since 1983. There would be no place for Davis under Diller. And two weeks ago, Viacom announced an $8.4 billion merger with home-video retailer Blockbuster Entertainment. That deal enabled Viacom to sweeten the cash portion of its bid for Paramount but left little in the way of a role for Davis. With the bidding war now in its final phase -- a winner is expected to emerge in early February -- Davis met last week with TIME Boston bureau chief Sam Allis and business editor Sam Gwynne for the Paramount...
...TIME: Why did you change your initial position and endorse the QVC bid this week...
...with a merger in September of Paramount and Viacom, and that merger is not going to take place along the lines we envisioned. The court, with which we respectfully disagreed, mandated that we auction off the company, and that is exactly what we have been doing. The latest QVC bid is a superior offer...
...into play when you do a transaction. That's par for the course. But we did not see it coming, in spite of what everybody else thinks we saw. Nobody perceived, including our bankers -- but I'm not going to blame this on bankers -- that there was another valid bid out there that could match the power of the two companies coming together...