Paramount Skydance has completed its $111B merger with Warner Bros. Discovery
arstechnica.com262 points by Mgtyalx a day ago
262 points by Mgtyalx a day ago
Nilay Patel: https://www.theverge.com/podcast/1004286/senator-adam-schiff...
> One of the longest-running tropes at The Verge is that a workable antitrust policy for the United States would be simply to forbid companies from buying Time Warner because it has never worked and it may never work again, and that we should just pass one law.
Checks out:
Jan 11, 2001: AOL and Time Warner merged to create AOL Time Warner
June 14, 2018: AT&T acquired Time Warner, renamed WarnerMedia
April 8, 2022: WarnerMedia spun out of AT&T, merged with Discovery
I was at HBO during the AOL merger, and for a time my work email became gcanyon0264@aol.com, because AOL corporate email shared namespace with its customers, and my personal AOL account was… gcanyon@aol.com
> because AOL corporate email shared namespace with its customers
I wonder where this ranks in the top 5 stupidest things I've ever heard. It's bad enough merging customer databases when two companies merge.
No other major ISP has ever done this that I know of. Likely because it's completely unnecessary. Who made this decision (and why weren't they fired immediately)?
Ah, so this is why our email addresses are @gmail.com and not @google.com.
I was always wondering about that; it seemed to me that it would have been free advertising to Google if their users had to write and say @google.com all the time.
> Who made this decision
Nobody. Going back to 1989 every AOL account had a screen name that was used as your login and your identity. Being an employee was just a flag on your account in the database.
In 1993 AOL launched its internet gateway that accepted something@aol.com and put it in your AOL Mail box. You could tell that someone was an AOL employee because a banner (I think it was) appeared at the top of the message telling you.
Some of the network engineering folks had real aol.net addresses, but I don't know how that was handled internally. I also think the Netscape folks eventually made enough of a stink to keep their previous email address too.
By that logic we should encourage giant companies to buy Warner Brothers. Each time it fails, it helps topple leviathans, which decreases market concentration.
Oh this is hilarious. Didn't AT&T also acquire HBO and spin them off too?
They did, but first they rebranded them as Max, thus destroying the incredible name value of HBO. It was renamed back to HBO as part of the spinout IIRC.
The "credit" for that move actually belongs to WarnerBros Discovery
My favorite part of that story is that McKinsey both advised WarnerBros Discovery to make that change, and then advised them to change it back, making millions each time. I wish I made that much money being bad at my job.
McKinsey and other management consultants exist to launder decisions made by upper management that management do not want to face consequences for. "It's not my fault, the consultants advised me that was the best option"
One of those jobs LLMs can easily take over.
Nope the entire point of the job is to have a person to blame when it goes wrong.
the blame is absorbed by McKinsey the corporation, not the people working there
they'll just use AI like everyone else but charge extra for it
I'm not sure if you are suggesting the CEO hedging their bets or the consultants, but I'd say both of those jobs could be replaced by an LLM.
You can replace low and maybe mid skill employees with software but it’s the high end ones consultants or CEO that are great at their jobs with good software can be orders of magnitude more efficient.
You misunderstand their job. They get paid millions to carefully construct a report that supports whatever stupid plan the coke-fueled execs came up with.
They are also functionally both a way for certain well-connected shareholders to exert disproportionate influence and a placating propaganda machine for the shareholders who aren't
Grease on the very corroded wheel of modern capitalism
They also somehow made everyone download new apps because apparently the old one couldn't be updated.
Companies wasting their money is the company's problem and it's really unclear to me why the government should give a single damn.
Because big companies destroying value makes the world worse? They're sucking up capital and not delivering anything to justify it.
Really thinking about what happens with these mergers and splits. In the end it is just moving numbers from one pile to an other. Nothing is really created or destroyed...
Well there is massive waste of time on doing all the stuff need for it to happen. But I think they would have come up with something as unproductive as that anyway so overall it is not like that time would have been spend for anything actually productive.
Made up "value" moving from one place to an other. Just so that some people have something to do. And most likely they would not have much productive things to do in any case.
Won't investors just learn to avoid investing in companies like that?
are you too young to have lived through the multiple recessions that have happened in the past few decades or Bernie Madoff or Enron? Or Theranos and FTX? and that's just off the top, give me ten minutes to dig in and I'll get you at least twenty more
None of those were the result of mergers.
Pedantic. The point was "aren't investors rational" and they clearly hop on short term fads to their and our detriment. Plus saying Enron wasn't a product of a merger is very funny
Passive investors earned 10% per year for the last 30 years doing no work and taking on no risk.
Seems very rational to me.
I'm sure passive investors loved the dotcom bubble and the housing market crash
I'm sure they'll love it when this AI bubble pops too