Word: diller
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Diller had other reasons to err on the side of caution. While serving as chairman of Rupert Murdoch's Fox Inc. in the late 1980s, he saw how excessive debt almost sank that entertainment company. In the end, Diller essentially threw in his hand and let Redstone rake in the pot. For Redstone, the triumph in what he angrily came to call "the cruel, abusive and sometimes ridiculous battle for Paramount" could hardly have been sweeter. With the battle about to end last Monday, Redstone, Biondi and two Viacom colleagues repaired to the posh "21" Club in midtown Manhattan...
...Viacom and Sumner Redstone, the company's iron-willed billionaire chairman, had looked like certain losers. But thanks to frenzied financial maneuvering and a stunning and perhaps precarious alliance with Blockbuster Entertainment Corp., the world's largest retail video-store operator, Viacom turned the battle around and put Barry Diller to rout...
This is the story of how Viacom won the battle and how Diller, one of the toughest and savviest Hollywood wizards, let the prize slip away. It is also the story of shattered careers, plunging stock prices and looming corporate shake-ups, all of which are part of the true cost of Viacom's $9.8 billion victory...
...down to a Sunday-afternoon skull session in the well-appointed 49th-floor midtown- Manhattan offices of Robert Greenhill, the chairman of investment firm Smith Barney Shearson. Four days earlier, on Jan. 12, Paramount directors had spurned a sweetened Viacom bid and backed a $10 billion merger with Barry Diller's QVC home-shopping network. Unless Viacom came back fast and hard, everyone present knew, the fight would soon be over...
With their minds thus concentrated, one thought dominated all those at the meeting: how to throw a knockout punch that would be, as one of them put it, a "Diller-killer." The notion of tossing in more cash or stock was quickly nixed as too costly. So were bigger warrants and increased dividends. After several such options were rejected, Greenhill turned to one of his whiz-kid investment-banking strategists, Michael Levitt, 35, who described a scheme he said would blow away Diller. The novel plan called for issuing a type of security, called a contingent value right...