This tale of AOL's disasterous purchase of Time-Warner also offers the sickly pleasure of watching billionaires act as though we should feel sorry for them, better yet, admire them, because they are actually altruists and gurus. Seriously. That's how they want to see themselves.
It's a strangely detached reading experience, since 98% of us aren't likely to be involved in such a big deal in our lives. Let alone see it blow up in our face. Yet the book is a compelling and compulsive read. See the CEOs run straight into a wall! Hear the ticking clock as the hopeless deal runs out of air...and then violently deflates.
Time Warner comes off a lot better than AOL, which makes me glad I switched services, but may also be because Munk
is "old media." But it isn't as though Jerry Levin comes off that much better than Steve Case--both their stories are apt to leave the reader scratching his or her head asking "How can people be such short-sighted daydreamers yet still make such serious bank?" You know you're reading a weird story when Ted Turner is coming out as one of the most levelheaded figures involved.
So this deal is going to go down in history as a billion-dollar boondoggle. But man, it makes interesting reading--and it lets me use the word "boondoggle."
But this story isn't just about AOL Time Warner but about corporate America in general, about how merger mania and golden parachuted moguls can play fast and loose with our money, our livelihood, our country, and our future. It's about the collateral damage, the megalomania, the broken hearts and the evaporated portfolios. It's about the mentality of corporate CEOs like Levin who as he turned sixty wanted to be remembered for something other than the bottom line, "for integrity...high moral principles; and wisdom." (p. 133) Ah, yes, a lifetime of chasing money and power and now True Religion. One is reminded of Bill Gates with the very demanding problem of how to distribute all that money wisely before he dies.
Munk knows these people. How she got them to be so carelessly candid at times amazes me, especially her work with Levin. She understands their psychology and to some significant extent, their business. She had to, to write this book and make it work. She packs the text with spiffy and sometimes all too revealing quotes. She has the heart of a baggy-eyed scholar and the soul of a muckraker. The almost surrealistic give and take between Case and Levin as they cooked The Deal reads like something out of a Hollywood movie. Whose ego, whose sense of personal power, and imagined historical accomplishment and brilliance needed massaging the most by whom? And who would steal more from the other? And the ease with which Salomon Smith Barney and Morgan Stanley each got $60-million for their part in the deal reads like tales of manna falling from heaven.
There are some black and white photos in the middle of the book. The test is exquisitely edited and proofed, and the book handsomely designed. Munk ends this "morality play," as she calls it, with a curtain call of the cast of characters in an epilogue and brings us up to date on what has happened to them and what they're doing now.
Incidentally, my subject-line quote about a "mess of porridge" is from Robert Murdoch, no doubt licking his chops. (p. 280)
Bottom line: you will be kept up at night reading this page turner. Better yet take it on that trip to Singapore. It's a jet-lag killer.
Part One "Resident Genius" covers a period from Time Inc. to Time Warner, 1923-1998. Munk provides essential background information which includes a penetrating analysis of Henry Luce.
Part Two Enter the Internet Cowboys: AOL, 1985-1999. Of special interest to me was Munk's analysis of the working relationship of an odd couple indeed, Steve Case and Robert Pittman.
Part Three The Big Deal: AOL and Time Warner, 1999-2000. Step-by-step, Munk traces the process which eventually resulted in "the biggest train wreck in the history of corporate America." I was fascinated to learn about the nature and extent of Ted Turner's involvement amidst corporate intrigues which would have made the Medici envious.
Part Four "Surviving Is Winning": AOL Time Warner 2003-2003. The material which Munk presents offers still another illustration of the fact that success has many parents but failure is an orphan. "Glued together on January 11, 2001, the company known as AOL Time Warner lasted two years, nine months, and five days before it fell apart....In late 2003, [renamed] Time Warner's stock hovered around $16, down 70% from January, 2001, when the AOL Time Warner deal closed."
After reading these four Parts, I proceeded to the Epilogue in which Munk provides an update on several of the "train wreckers." Meyer Berlow "has found a new vocation: he's a wood turner who spends eight hours a day at a lathe, making wooden bowls and other vessels in his workshop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn." Jeff Bewes and Don Logan are now the two most powerful executives at Time Warner, after Dick Parsons. What about Case? In January 2003, he resigned as chairman of the company. "In late 2003, [he] opened an office on Washington, D.C.'s K Street. From there he oversees his investments, which thus far have largely been restricted to Hawaii, his native state."
For me, Levin is the most interesting. Since the train wreck, he "has distanced himself from his past yet again....[and] rarely communicates with former colleagues or associates. 'I'm not in the Hollywood community, I'm not in the media community. That's not where I'm looking for my sustenance.'" Then where is he? According to Munk, Levin has a new life. "He also has a new vocation: the healing arts. Together with his fiancee, Laurie Perlman, a psychologist, Levin is helping to create a holistic mental health institute in Los Angeles, California."
Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner is first-rate in all respects. Hopefully those who read this brief commentary will be encouraged to read other recently published books which also examine "the culture of corporate America and Wall Street in the late 1900s." My own recommendations include the aforementioned Smartest Guys in the Room as well as Kara Swisher's There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere, Alec Klein's Stealing Time : Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner, Jo Johnson and Martine Orange's The Man Who Tried to Buy the World: Jean-Marie Messier and Vivendi Universal, and Rebecca Smith and John R. Emshwiller's 24 Days: How Two Wall Street Journal Reporters Uncovered the Lies that Destroyed Faith in Corporate America.