Former Time Warner chairman, president and CEO Jeff Bewkes said AT&T executives went back on pre-merger promises about how the legacy phone company would handle his HBO, Warner Bros. and CNN. That was the “most disappointing” part of the $85.4 billion mega-deal, one that is about to be unraveled by the pending Discovery-WarnerMedia merger, Bewkes told author James Andrew Miller.
In the new oral-history book “Tinderbox: HBO’s Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers,” Bewkes said he was assured that following their 2018 merger, AT&T brass “would basically leave our people alone.”He said that it didn’t happen. According to a Wall Street JournalThe book is currently unavailable for purchase.
“We didn’t think they would go to such a level of malpractice as to not listen to anybody…even though they themselves had no experience in those areas,”Miller was informed by Bewkes.
Bewkes did not express regret over the decision to sell to AT&T, however, according to WSJ. (The merger was complicated by government meddling and took many years to achieve its goal. All the while, Time Warner was fending off a takeover by Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox.)
Also in the book, John Stankey, who is AT&T’s CEO, defended how his company handed the staff they (basically) bought. AT&T consolidated Time Warner’s cable channels, among other moves that proved to be unpopular with Bewkes, but there was good (financial) reason for that, Stankey said.
“If you are in an acquisition and somebody pays a premium for your stock, by definition it means something has to change,”Stankey spoke to Miller. “If you paid a premium for an operation and you continue to operate it exactly the same way, you never pay back the premium.”
Miller, who previously wrote oral histories. “Saturday Night Live”ESPN conducted 757 interviews and interviewed more than 600 people. “Tinderbox: HBO’s Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers.”The book will be released Nov. 23.
Check out the WSJ story Here.
The Discovery-WarnerMedia deal is expected to close in mid-2022. David Zaslav, long-standing boss at Discovery, Inc., will be in charge of the combined media companies.