Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media. Michael Wolff

of his corporate offspring, were, or feared themselves to be, corporate weaklings.

      They were, for instance, afraid of Steve Ross. And, out of that fear, admired him.

      Because he did deals.

      But it wasn’t only gonifism on the rise, the triumph of the vulgar Hollywood Jews over the buttoned-down Wasps. It was not just a philosophical or temperamental tide, but a technical one as well.

      You had to understand deals not just as the process of putting companies together to make bigger companies, but as a process of using money in a way that increased your ability to use more money.

      Leverage was the thing.

      Media was a financing game. Media was like real estate.

      One asset was meant to mortgage another.

      The more you mortgaged, the more you could mortgage.

      The more deals you did, the more deals you could do.

      It had been said before: If you borrow a little, the bank owns you; borrow a lot and you own the bank.

      This required a head for numbers and hubris too—somebody with a big ego who could count. (Although there were many failed instances of men who tried to step up merely on the basis of hubris.)

      Such men became the instruments for the creation of vast companies that were—sometimes to a fully realized degree, other times frustratingly falling short of their radical idea—not really companies at all, not collegial enterprises, not thematic expressions, not coherent functions, but extreme reflections of themselves and of their ability to do deals.

      Simply, moguls led media companies. If you didn’t have a good mogul, you didn’t have a good media company.

      The entire Darwinian process of the media business was not about the winnowing out and promotion of good media, or good companies, but the natural selection of good moguls.

      And the whole game was the rise and fall of these sui generis, savantlike beings—around them, you might argue, the business itself became something of an afterthought.

      And so, in the nineties, there was the Time and Warner merger. Then there was the deal under which—to hold down the massive debt incurred from the Time and Warner deal—a piece of Time Warner’s entertainment and cable companies was sold to John Malone, another of the media business’ great lousy-deal makers. Then CNN was acquired (ruining that company). And along the way there were hundreds of other transactions, bigger and smaller. Then, on January 10, 2000, Time Warner announced it was merging with AOL. (Days before the announcement, I was flipping channels and paused for a moment on a CNN show that had on its panel Jerry Levin, Isaacson, media and culture commentator Kurt Andersen—also a former Timer—and the New Yorker’s mogul-fanzine writer Ken Auletta, talking about the future of the media. Suddenly, in the discussion, Levin, who probably knew he was soon to announce the largest merger in history, started to talk about governments‘ fading and some new sort of corporate city-states’ rising and how the world would be mediated in some vaguely sci-fi-ish New Agey Rollerball digital way.)

      The Time Ivy Leaguers (grown weary and depressed through the nineties), the Warner Hollywood heavies (many of them alter cockers now), and the ever-more-furious Ted Turner were married to some suburban database hucksters from Dulles, Virginia.

      There was certainly no sense in the auditorium that this was the last merger. That this deal might define a level of overreach and prompt a turnaround.

      After all, deals had always gone wrong, and we all still had jobs.

      But, in fact, no deal had ever gone wrong like the AOL—Time Warner deal was in short order going to go wrong. This would be the worst deal ever made, defining not just a level of bad deal making, or of inimical corporate cultures, but of the profound lack of science in any deal. Not just a tissue rejection, but a whole set of doctors who had no idea what they were doing. Forevermore, in every media deal, this would have to be an operative question: Do they know what they are doing? Do they know what they are talking about? What planet are they on? And what do they smoke there?

      Nobody knew it yet, but we had commenced a new phase, a whole new era, of resistance and revision.

      January 10, 2000, was the beginning of the end.

Book ONE

       1

       THE COMEDY

      The media business is collapsing. The structure is caving in, like a monarchy, or colonial rule, or communism.

      The handful of companies that control the consciousness of our time are trembling and heaving, about to fall victim to internal weakness and external obsolescence.

      If by the spring of 2002, this seemed obvious to many logically minded people, what logic did not account for were the moves and countermoves, as well as the pure denial, that delayed the inevitable end. Logic was up against the kind of powerful men, progressive business theories, public relations resources, and mountains of financial analysis—not to mention lots of charm and brutishness—that make most reporters and columnists end up believing that the moguls and their henchmen who run these businesses really do know what they’re doing and that the next big deal is the big deal that will bring about a perfectly realized, synergistic business condition.

      Now, it is not just spin and spreadsheets that obfuscate the real predicament of these colossuses, but the media culture itself. The media, like all social and political systems, works on its own behalf. The social reality—to be a player in the media is to be among the most powerful people of the age—belies a contrary business reality, that the business barely supports itself.

      We are in a novel of manners—the pretense is the thing.

      Therefore, to tell the story of the media, you have to tell the story of the rituals and conceits and behavioral norms and notions of propriety that hold it up.

      Instead of a purposeful business story, it should be something more like a drawing room comedy—not a story about corporate success and failure as much as one about individual need and weakness and, of course, opportunism.

      How to reduce such vast companies and so many divergent players to a small stage? How to bring such outsized men with their praetorian retinues into the same room?

      The task was to find these people in their element, to move among them seamlessly. To be of them—but not employed by them (or, even worse, sucked up to by them—because their charm is not ordinary charm).

      How to find the functional equivalent of a weekend at an English country house with a representative set of mogul kingpins as the guests?

      Indeed, if business is the center of the modern world, which most certainly it is, then we have to find the dramatic context in which to reveal its true character.

      Let us wait for such an opportunity.

       2

       MY TABLE

      In the spring of 2002—in the year of the autumn in question—I received an official, even ceremonious, invitation to have lunch with two journalists I knew from the Internet years (already sounding like some druggy past, or a best-forgotten unpopular war). They had a proposal to discuss. We want to bounce something off of you, one of them said in an email.

      And so we met at Michael’s. To have lunch at Michael’s seemed specifically part of their