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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      It was nearly Barnum-esque in the telling.

      Now, I have been to so many conferences—as many as twelve a year for as much as fifteen years—and there have been so many more that I have managed to avoid going to (while conferences were built on the idea of exclusivity, their sheer numbers made it really hard to make the exclusivity argument anymore—although, of course, conference organizers did), that I was not, at that moment with Heilemann and Battelle, thinking the conference, this conference, might be the perfect setting for my weekend of media moguls.

      Instead, I was thinking, Not another fucking conference.

      Of course, I knew what was in it for Battelle and Heilemann.

      The money could be very good. In the boom years, you could do four or five or six hundred people at a conference like this, for three or four or five thousand dollars a head, with your talent, your presenters, your headliners even, getting nothing whatsoever—which was, I knew, the deal they were going to cut with me (the economic principle was that participants benefited from the same association that everyone else benefited from, that a good conference supplied new and valuable connections to everyone who went). Indeed, if you got a conference going, got on people’s schedules, a once-or-twice-a-year sort of thing, you had a sure multimillion-dollar annuity.

      What’s more, there was an opening in the market niche. For twelve years, the TED conference (technology, entertainment, design), held in Monterey, California, had been a vital date on the media-technology-communications complex calendar. It was the big one, regularly attracting nearly a thousand people, at $4,000 a head, with sponsors covering many of the underlying costs—and a staff, functionally, of one. Richard Saul Wurman, a Sydney Green-street figure, ran the conference and every year collected the $4 million or so; the educated guess was that his profit margin might have been as high as 75 or 80 percent. But now he had sold the conference—and whether or not the new owners could do it as well was far from clear. If you could take that place, you could build yourself a powerful base of operations in the media world.

      This is where Battelle stepped in. He explained the money part.

      It occurred to me that that’s what Battelle did now. That this was perhaps all that interested him: the deal. He knew, better than most—as well as any banker, or mogul—that you lived and died on the basis of the deal. The deal was the force.

      The deal was this: Quadrangle, a New York—based investment fund specializing in the media industry, was backing the conference, to be called Foursquare, which would be a partnership among Heilemann and Battelle and Quadrangle. And while, ideally, this was to be a moneymaking enterprise, Quadrangle would absorb any deficit. (Of course, I knew that if Quadrangle was accepting the losses, it was a far from equal partnership, if it was a partnership at all.) What’s more, Quadrangle was contributing its influence to attract the desirable level of speakers and participants.

      This made sense. If no one at all paid to attend, if everyone became an invited guest, this was still an acceptable marketing cost for Quadrangle. Everyone they’d ever want to do business with would be a captive audience for three days. The Quadrangle guys would be able to strut their stuff.

      But lest this appear to be just a marketing ploy, bankers sucking up to prospective clients, Battelle argued the opposite point:

      “This isn’t just schmooze. There’ll be schmooze, but this is an editorially driven conference. We want to tell a story. What we want is for journalists to be interviewing and questioning the seniormost executives in the industry. So this isn’t just guys, like in most conferences, giving sales pitches and the usual patter, this is people with information being questioned by people who know how to get information.”

      This is the pitch, I realized, they had sold the Quadrangle people. It was a serious affair—a serious affair with money.

      “So what do you think,” Heilemann asked, “is going to happen? Go wide. What are the trends? What’s the—”

      “I think everything is going to collapse.”

      “Everything? Beyond AOL Time Warner?”

      “Certainly Disney and Vivendi are totally fucked.”

      “Messier,” said Battelle, naming the Vivendi chairman, “is on board to speak at the conference.”

      “Really?” Messier was surely doomed, yet I was impressed that they had gotten him. I had been wanting to meet him. He was even more interesting, I thought, a greater “get” because he was out there in free fall.

      “And Viacom is obviously an armed camp and can’t last after Sumner—” Sumner Redstone, Viacom’s 79-year-old chairman and controlling shareholder, was in a standoff with his handpicked successor, Mel Karmazin. “The same thing for News Corp.—it’s not a company that makes any sense whatsoever without Murdoch.”

      This hypothesis—predicting the inevitable collapse of the five megamedia-opolises which dominated the industry—was as workable a theme as any.

      It was 1914 in Europe.

      “What about Bertelsmann?”

      “Totally fucked.”

      It was some measure of both the peculiar nature and commonplace self-loathing of the media business that you could hold an industry conference and be relatively nonchalant about proposing that the industry was going to implode. On the other hand, it was part of the conceit here that this was a kind of true congress, at which representatives would converge and we would discuss the future of media nations.

      “Can we interest you? Who would you like to do? If you did a one-on-one, an interview on stage, who would you like to do?”

      It was a time to grab a big enchilada. It was certainly no time to be modest. There weren’t that many enchiladas.

      It was Diller or Murdoch.

      Because more mystery attended them, more cult of personality, more secret of success, more mogul history, the interviews with Murdoch and Diller would be the big draws of the conference. What’s more, if you could do it right, cannily and subtly, and have them reveal themselves—that would be a score.

      Their existence, it seemed to me, had never been adequately explained. Murdoch certainly had held more power longer than anyone else—from his arrival in the U.S. in 1976 to now, he had just kept growing, just kept becoming more and more significant. As for Diller, he may just have defied more conventions of power than anyone else. And it often struck me he was doing this with a certain humor or irony, which might be the ultimate defiance of the power convention.

      “If I could face either Diller or Murdoch I would certainly be interested—definitely count me in.”

       4

       THE POWERS THAT BE

      Possibly, I’ve thought, I’m something like an old-time Washington columnist—Drew Pearson, James Reston, even Walter Lippmann—in this new kind of ultimate power scene.

      They dealt with matters of state and with the egos and idiosyncrasies of statesmen. I deal with the consolidation of the global СКАЧАТЬ