Word: viacom
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...takeover brawl unfold before your eyes! Marvel at the clash of colossal egos! Gasp at the gyrating stock prices! Not since the 1980s has Wall Street so unabashedly savored a fight as it did the one that broke out last week for filmmaker Paramount Communications. With a bid from Viacom Inc. valued at $7.5 billion already on the table, QVC shopping-network chairman Barry Diller unveiled a staggering $9.5 billion counteroffer. Paramount stockholders could almost be heard sighing at the thought of their potential profits. In a counterassault with personal overtones, Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone fired back with an antitrust...
...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...
...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 week not to offer...
...pots and all the kettles are black. Viacom had a point when it sued Malone last week, accusing him of "bullyboy" monopolism (Malone not only is the country's largest cable-system operator, but owns significant chunks of a dozen basic cable channels, and with Paramount would get half the USA Network). But Viacom enjoys a pretty monopolistic lock on the music-video business with...
...VIACOM...