Word: paramountly
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...fight for RJR Nabisco) that burdened corporations with excessive debt, ignited newspaper headlines and enriched everyone from corporate raiders to takeover lawyers. "The only criteria were who won or lost and how the companies were split up," says Felix Rohatyn, a senior partner at investment banker Lazard Freres, Paramount's adviser. In that rapacious era, "we wouldn't look at a deal under $1 billion," says James Stewart, a former front-page editor of the Wall Street Journal and author of the best seller Den of Thieves. "That was for spot news...
However the Paramount fight plays out, Wall Street dealmakers don't expect a re-enactment of '80s-style takeover frenzy anytime soon. Debt remains a dirty word in many executive suites, and intense foreign competition has put pressure on companies to merge in ways that make sense for their long-term abilities to expand. "Nobody does a deal for what they used to call financial reasons any longer," says arbitrager Kalin. "The merger has got to fit in with your company." While the Paramount battle is happily reminiscent of the '80s, she adds, it will probably prove to be just...
...that extra-rational accumulation of wishful hunches and adrenal instinct that makes people finally just go for it. Since show-business executives are uncommonly sensitive to go-for-it twitches, it would have been weird if a competing bidder had not stepped in to turn the friendly merger of Paramount Communications and Viacom into the high-strung, insanely complicated struggle it became last week...
...narrative gets richer. A decade ago, Diller brilliantly ran Paramount under Martin Davis, and the antipathy today is intense and mutual, although not, according to two entertainment power brokers close to Diller, an important impetus for the current takeover attempt -- just a "cherry on the sundae," says...
...great industrial consolidations of the Rockefellers and Harrimans a century ago were simpleminded checkers games by comparison to this 3-D chess match. Tracking the corporate cross-purposes and potential conflicts of interest makes the brain hurt. Paramount's Davis, surely a lame duck no matter who wins, wants Sumner Redstone's Viacom to become his proprietor, but both will be millions richer even if Diller and Malone prevail. Because Malone controls a quarter of the stock in Turner Broadcasting, mellowing Ted Turner (he told someone recently he's "a lot less hungry" than certain other moguls) was persuaded last...