Time Warner’s Non-Mogul Mogul Who Foretold Its Worth

Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the chief executive of Time Warner, made a big bet in the summer of 2014 when he rejected an $80 billion takeover bid by 21st Century Fox, controlled by Rupert Murdoch. Bewkes had promised shareholders that Time Warner would create more value on its own than any proposal Fox was positioned to offer. Privately, Bewkes was telling colleagues and investors that Time Warner was likely to land a much more lucrative deal if it were put on the market a couple of years later. Among the potential bidders, Time Warner reasoned, were deep-pocketed technology companies like Apple and Google — and even, possibly, AT&T, which was tied up with a different deal at the time.

Over the next two years, it was not clear that Bewkes had played his cards right. Fears of cord-cutting, ratings declines and a weak advertising market stoked panic across the industry over the future of traditional media in a digital world. And while Time Warner introduced several efforts to transform the company, such as a stand-alone streaming service for HBO, questions persisted about whether the company would have the resources to compete with the likes of Netflix and Amazon. As it turns out, Bewkes’s bet paid off. In a big way. On Oct 22, AT&T announced that it had agreed to buy Time Warner for about $85.4 billion, or $107.50 a share in cash and stock — about a 35 percent premium to where Time Warner’s stock was trading before reports of the merger talks, and well above the $85 a share Fox was offering. For Bewkes, the deal has sealed his legacy as a behind-the-scenes non-mogul media mogul.