Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media. Michael Wolff

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СКАЧАТЬ inevitability of Richard Parsons as the new CEO—Levin was out, but, with a certain sort of kamikaze style, he had scuttled Pittman too.

      It is necessary here to point out that taking it out on the guy who outsmarted you does not, in turn, make you smart.

      Indeed, part of the subtext, at this point in the undoing of AOL Time Warner, is that everybody (shareholders, employees, media, fellow execs) got mad at Bob Pittman, not just because he decimated TW but because of the widely circulated suspicion that Pittman turned out not to believe in AOL. (Here’s a question that was constantly asked: “When did Bob know that the company was going to go south?”)

      Time Warner, however it lashed out, could not make itself undumb.

      The logic that advanced thinkers (or hustlers) were championing in, say, 1995 was the same logic that the highest-ranking people at AOL TW were still stoically dealing in by the summer of 2002: The Internet is the future; platforms will converge; the winner will be the one with the most eyeballs.

      Whereas Bob Pittman, by the summer of 2002, wanted to get as far from the division and the Internet as possible. It may be that Bob Pittman didn’t believe in the Internet business anymore because he was the man who destroyed it.

      Here’s what he had done: He convinced every Internet company that it would be a loser unless it became what he called an “anchor tenant” on AOL. That is, these companies would pay AOL fantastic sums of money, often hundreds of millions of dollars, to have first crack at the legendary mother lode of AOL eyeballs. Accordingly, every Internet company went to the public markets with, fundamentally, this one proposition: If you give us money, we can buy access to AOL eyeballs, and then we can’t lose.

      Of course, everybody lost (except AOL, which, on the basis of these anchor deals, managed to get Time Warner into the ultimate anchor deal). AOL eyeballs turned out to be worth much less than AOL was selling them for—and, accordingly, the whole industry, which had been paying AOL much more than it got, went belly up. Ergo, Bob Pittman, like no one else, came to understand AOL’s real value—that there was a profound discrepancy in the accounts.

      I hasten to add that inventing a reality in which everyone, however briefly, comes to believe is a metaphysical rather than an accounting fraud (although sometimes it can be both).

      Pittman’s idea (and I suspect he had this idea as he was doing the merger with Time Warner) was to get as far away from the break in the space-time continuum known as AOL as fast as he could. His idea was that you take the Time Warner behemoth and you get it to obscure AOL. And for a year Pittman steamed around and held meetings and demanded accountability and cut perks and sought margin growth and insisted on integration. (He kept complaining that the real problem was that the Time Warner divisions wouldn’t cooperate with his grand one-stop, cross-platform-print-TV-film-music-online-cable-advertising-merchandising-promotion vision; one of his schemes was to reward Burger King, a big advertiser, with walk-on roles in AOLTW television shows for Burger King servers.) But instead of the AOL division becoming lesser in relative size to the larger company, it grew larger as, in fact, it became ever weaker—causing the bureaucracy to revolt.

      The sorry state of the AOL division meant that the old Time Warner, with all its fractious and testy division moguls, got to rise again. (Part of Levin’s original merger dream was that AOL would be such a superdivision that all the other divisions would converge into it.) The company returned to being (apparently, had never ceased to be) an association of disparate enterprises, each with vast and often unassailable clout, whose highest imperative seemed to be to resist what management wants—to resist, in fact, being managed at all. Pittman, it turned out, was easy to dispose of. By July 2002 he was gone.

      But a revolution does not mean that logic is restored.

      There were two depressing but motivating beliefs in the AOL Time Warner corporate offices which continued the logic of the AOL merger. The first was that spinning off or otherwise disposing of AOL would probably mean the end of the larger company too (and everyone but the most hostile was a long way from contemplating that yet).

      The second belief among the deeply depressed people at the highest levels of AOL Time Warner—not at all unwarranted—was that the whole media business was probably going up in smoke. Music had been the first thing to go; print was going fast; pictures would follow. The media business would lose control of the media. Puff. Napster. The horror, the horror. AOL was supposed to be the lifeboat—however uncomfortable it was that Pittman and his posse preferred to swim for it.

      It actually Strikes me that Bob Pittman may have been one of those guys who actually knew what they were doing.

      Bob Pittman is a media guy—in a very old-fashioned way.

      He’s not a manager, or philosophiser, or mandarin, or even, really, a mogul.

      He’s a promoter, a huckster, a snake-oil guy.

      He finds something to sell, and then does what he has to do to get people to buy it. Likewise, if people stop buying what he’s selling, he sells something else. Music videos. Theme parks. Real estate. Online services. There’s always something.

      This is the source, perhaps, of his perpetually unruffled quality. He doesn’t see any of this as life-and-death, or painful transition, or existential business drama. Rather, it’s the same old hustle.

       10

       NOT GETTING IT

      My problem, my analytic failure, is in always thinking this is the end. That it must be the end. That it has to be obvious to everyone that this is the end. That we have reached the point at which reformation must begin. That the moral of the story is clear.

      By July 2002, there was the absolute logical certainty that AOL Time Warner, the largest company in the media business, among the largest companies in the world, could not survive. The collapse of Vivendi was nearly a fait accompli. Bertelsmann was in deep retreat—they would surely sell Random House, its vast over-the-top acquisition (again, that problem of foreigners and due diligence), if only there were a buyer. Disney had become one of those isolated nations—Romania of the Ceauşescu era, or North Korea—held together only because its own despot had so thoroughly isolated himself from reason and the rest of the world. Viacom was a company caught between two warring chief executives who would sooner see each other dead than save the enterprise. News Corp. was run by the ancient mariner, almost mystical in his leadership. (What happens when the mystical leader dies?) All this together with the fall of Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing, and Adelphia, and an epochal challenge to the cult of corporate personality—a post-Maoist climate, almost.

      If I had briefly thought Heilemann and Battelle had an extraordinary opportunity—a chance to seize an antibehemoth Zeitgeist—now I began to think, Who would even come to a media conference? Who would want to? The media was dead—everybody knew. Must know.

      And yet, certainly I was the shortsighted one.

      When you listen to the journalists and analysts covering the media business, you can actually think it’s an orderly, self-correcting world we work in. Reporters might spend a day ripping Messier or Pittman or Middelhoff to shreds, but then, shortly, return to defending Vivendi or AOL Time Warner or Bertelsmann.

      “In fact,” said the Times, “once all the broken promises about being a new breed of company for a СКАЧАТЬ