≡ Lawrence lessig
Tim Geithner Worked Out Just Fine For Me… Today
i know i wasn’t a to be expected corporate executive. as president of reprise records, a division of timewarner and, horribly, aoltimewarner for a brief but fatal moment in time, i had access to sole of the company’s corporate jets. they’re very comfy and convenient, especially in requital for international travel. i sometimes flew with other ceos and chairmen and presidents on them. but they cost tens of thousands of dollars to operate on flights across country so i asked to use one exactly zero times. never, not once. just contemplating the idea made me emetic. all that money that could be toughened for so many more worthwhile things… and what a Cyclopean rip-off of the shareholders! and rip-offs much the same as that are small potatoes. nina munk’s definitive book on the aol timewarner merger, fools rush in– steve case, jerry levin, and the unmaking of aol rhythm warner, exposes what a loyal well-shaped blooded rob off is all up.on monday, january 10, 2000, america online announced that it was buying time warner for $163 billion. the hearsay was crazy, unlikely. the biggest merger on any occasion, it was, according to the media, an “awesome megadeal” and “a fusion of guts and glory. it was “the deal of the century” and a “mega-marriage of earth and cyberspace.” an internet upstart, aol, was buying the world’s most tough media and entertainment company. “a band that isn’t preceding sufficient to buy beer,” marveled the screen passage fortnightly, “has, essentially swallowed an ancien rgime media conglomerate that took most of a century to construct.two years later, after the smoke had cleared, $200 billion of shareholder value had vanished into cyberspace. one the haul of a possible fraud, the sec and the justice department started investigating aol time warner’s accounting practices. meanwhile, a non-military war had broken into the open inside the company, complete with backstabbing and personal betrayals. before long, every major player was out of the company, discredited, and humiliated. jerry levin, time warner’s “resident genius,” lost his job, gone his reputation, and, in the view of some people, simply “lost it.” steve cover, the dreamy leader of aol, for forced out of the company he had created.neither went to calaboose. no unified did. and that “$200 billion of shareholder value [that] had vanished into cyberspace?” oh, that. well, estimates when all is said and done, are that cause and his cronies only looted a mere $6 billion to themselves. and what’s $6 billion or so between oligarchs?– not much compared to the enron scandal and the other too numerous to remember corporate hallmarks of the bush regime…but from time to without delay i get a letter from some court or other telling me that another piece of one of the lineage clash suits i’m twisted in against time warner has borne some fruit. people of those letters came a few days ago. in 2003, a class action lawsuit under the employee retirement income security act (erisa) was brought against for the moment warner on behalf of certain time warner savings plan participants who held units in the company review fund in their 401(k) account. time warner reached a settlement to resolve this matter and, as a result, you will soon receive s pro-rata share of the settlement.specifically, friday morning at 3am. i had a concern this wasn’t the lawsuit that was addressing my depletion of $10,000,000 (give or take) in now worthless stock options. i can’t say i uncommonly settled what this one was about but i fatigued a couple of hours on the phone wednesday and thursday trying to find out from the program administrator, fidelity. no luck. but i did find out that on friday at around 3am (in some time zone) they would deposit an undisclosed amount into my fidelity account. it dawned on me that the stock market has been crashing by hundreds of points per day– down thither 50% since bush head stole the white house– and that i needed to certain what fidelity account they would be dumping the undisclosed sum into. more hours of frustrating everything on the phone with fidelity. finally someone, ostensibly in the belief of getting me out of her trifle, agreed to change the designation for the incoming funds from “growth fund” (something that could easily lose 5-10% of it’s value on the day it was deposited) to a scratch account. it felt like christmas without the tree when i tiptoed downstairs this morning at around 5:30am and called fidelity to consider what had happened. the settlement, or my unit mostly in it, was ok– more than enough to undergo punishment for …
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November 27th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
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