Word: mergers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...courtship had all the frenzied twists of a Looney Tunes cartoon--or CNN's Gulf War coverage. For nearly a month, with the world looking on, Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin used shuttle diplomacy to pursue an $8 billion merger with Ted Turner's Turner Broadcasting. Spectators watched in bemusement as Time Warner acknowledged its courtship, then appeared to be stymied by cable-TV king John Malone, a Time Warner rival whose Turner stake gives him effective veto power over a deal. But by Sunday, as TIME went to press, Levin and Turner were tantalizingly close to sealing an agreement...
...make matters dicier, a merger would also bring Malone, the chairman of Tele-Communications Inc. and a man with a bent for elaborate corporate schemes, into Time Warner's fractious family. Malone, who stands to convert the 21% of Turner stock he controls into about a 9% stake in Time Warner, strung out the talks with a long and changing list of demands that threatened to block an agreement. "He asks for everything," says a Time Warner executive. "You never know when he's finished." Levin and Malone hashed out their main differences at a Sept. 9 meeting...
...board. Without the poison pill, a large shareholder such as Malone or Edgar Bronfman Jr., who heads Seagram and MCA and controls 14.9% of Time Warner, could gobble stock and launch a hostile bid for the company. (Bronfman's stake would drop to about 9% after the merger...
...Hollywood, meanwhile, the latest maybe-merger is hot-wiring the rumor industry and alarming many players. "It's a horrifying chain of events," says Cary Brokaw, chairman of the independent Avenue Pictures. "Consolidations like this one could foreclose competitive outlets...
...Levin envisioned folding the Turner enterprises into the Time Warner combination, even before Time Inc. bought Warner Communications. Time Warner executives have courted Turner for years, hoping to get him to fold his company into theirs. The sticking point was always the role Turner would play after such a merger. The offer last week of the vice chairmanship represented a significant concession by Levin...