Word: vivendi
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...trademark tan has dimmed, and his voice softens when he recounts the tumultuous events surrounding his downfall as a corporate titan. But if former Vivendi Universal CEO Jean-Marie Messier no longer boasts the "master of the world" moniker, don't expect to find him repudiating his stint as an empire-building media tycoon either. "I still receive e-mails and get stopped in the street by young people saying 'You gave me the desire to form my own company,'" says Messier...
...followed that very desire in the months after his 2002 ejection from Vivendi in the depths of the tech bust. With the help of a borrowed office, he founded the New York City--based mergers-and-acquisitions advisory boutique Messier Partners. Says Messier, in one of the rare interviews he's given since he left Vivendi: "I don't manage large teams anymore that run businesses that you can't control or you can't be sure to get satisfaction from. I like advising CEOs, and I love helping them with negotiations...
...Wallach ’07 and Maxwell C. Drummey ’07, a Harvard fixture since the pair’s freshman year, is currently in contract negotiations with Star Trak Entertainment, a subsidiary of Interscope Records, Universal Music Group, and Vivendi SA. Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo—the core members of producing team the Neptunes and rock group N.E.R.D., who have produced and written songs for such artists as Justin Timberlake—co-founded Star Trak in 2002. In addition to putting out Neptunes records and Pharrell’s solo work...
Veolia's history is no less complicated. After 1994 chairman Jean-Marie Messier moved Compagnie Générale des Eaux full steam into the media business, but his empire cracked after a high-gloss purchase of Seagram to form Vivendi Universal. After Messier's ignominious fall in 2002 in a morass of debt, the environmental-services businesses spun off and dropped the tainted name Vivendi to become Veolia...
...more successful than the last one, when many firms got caught up in merger frenzy and ended up overpaying for sometimes dubious assets. Several of Europe's biggest companies succumbed, including German automaker DaimlerChrysler, which only recently unwound a costly investment in Japan's Mitsubishi Motors, and France's Vivendi Universal, which briefly teetered close to bankruptcy in 2002 after a huge acquisition binge by its former ceo Jean-Marie Messier. Morgan Stanley's Pereira contends that the latest activity is fundamentally different. "A lot of M&A then was driven by technology, media and telecommunications [companies], where business models...