Word: warners
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Levin rejoined the board in 1988 as Time Inc. vice chairman and added the title of chief operating officer of Time Warner last spring. He not only cultivated ties with Ross but also made a point of learning all he could about Warner's movie and other entertainment operations...
...will be more able to bridge the two cultures than the reserved Nicholas was. But they doubt that Levin will help Ross complete any takeover. "Levin is not in the Ross faction," says Andrew Heiskell, a former chairman of Time Inc. "He's in the Levin faction." One Time Warner director predicts that under Levin "there's going to be a real effort to have the Time Incers feel they're more important and that they are players...
Though some analysts speculated that the shake-up might ease the way for a sell-off of Time Warner's magazine subsidiary, Levin -- like Nicholas -- adamantly opposes any such move. According to To the End of Time, a sharply critical book by Richard Clurman, a former TIME chief of correspondents, it was Levin who remarked at the time of the merger that "the core ((of the new company)) is not Bugs Bunny, it's TIME magazine." Levin is said by some to believe that sizable layoffs at the magazines last year helped demoralize their staffs unnecessarily. He is also said...
Beyond this effort to shore up the publishing side, insiders expect Levin to make few sharp changes in Time Warner's direction -- at least not quickly. "He'll discuss, he'll debate," says Michael Fuchs, chairman and CEO of Home Box Office, Levin's corporate alma mater. "Jerry's style is not to make dramatic moves. He's a plodder with a lot of patience. He has the most long- term view in the company...
Wall Street's immediate reaction -- a jump of nearly $2 a share in the company's stock Friday -- suggested a widespread belief that Time Warner had broken a damaging stalemate. The company has made considerable financial progress lately. It has reduced its burdensome debt from $11.2 billion to $8.7 billion, and in the final quarter of 1991 reported its first profit, of $45 million, since the merger. Nonetheless, many financial sources say it has been moving much more slowly than it should have been because of near paralytic tension at the top -- tension between Ross and Nicholas...