Word: viacom
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...bought about 13% of QVC, the cable-TV retailer that is the Home Shopping Network's prime competitor. But he hadn't quite shaken his yen for upscale properties and in short order was using QVC to launch the exhaustively chronicled bidding war for Paramount that he lost to Viacom's Sumner Redstone. By the summer of 1994, Diller was describing a projected takeover of CBS as his "destiny." But Comcast, a cable company that owned a 15.5% stake in QVC, squelched the deal and then tendered its own offer to buy out Diller's share of the channel. Bitterly...
...impossible, for anyone to do well for very long. Biondi seems to have been the victim of another common business syndrome: an entrepreneur-owner's reluctance to hand over control to a successor. Redstone, who built his fortune from a chain of movie theaters, hired Biondi shortly after acquiring Viacom in a leveraged buyout in 1987. A Harvard M.B.A. and former chief executive at HBO, Biondi had a style that seemed to mesh well with that of the boss: Redstone, the volatile, confrontational owner; Biondi, the even-tempered manager--Redstone's "secret weapon," in the words of a New Yorker...
...question is whether the sun will continue to shine on Viacom. The company's stock fell 3 5/8 on the day after Biondi's ouster, apparently reflecting Wall Street skepticism about Redstone's ability to run Viacom at his age. (The stock recouped a quarter of that loss the next day, closing the week at 37 7/8.) Redstone's response to the gerontology issue: "If Bob Dole thinks he can run the country at age 72," he told a company director, "then I can run Viacom...
...VIACOM HEAD ROLLS...
Frank Biondi, president and CEO of Viacom, was ousted by chairman Sumner Redstone, who said the company needed more aggressive leadership. Nine years ago, Redstone lured Biondi away from Coca-Cola, and in 1994 he awarded him $16.3 million in cash and stock-option bonuses for his role in Viacom's takeover of Paramount...