When a media company buys another, the acquired firm's regime is usually shoved out the door. But AT&T's top executive says he plans to keep in place much of Time Warner's management team.
AT&T announced its $84.5 billion acquisition of Time Warner over the weekend, and the heads of both companies _Randall Stephenson of AT&T and Jeffrey Bewkes of Time Warner _ said maintaining the executive ranks of the media company would be a priority.
"I made it clear to Jeff that the talent that he assembled was a really important part of this deal," Stephenson said. "And it was going to be really critical that we have continuity in the team that he has built."
Senior Time Warner executives _ including Warner Bros. Chairman Kevin Tsujihara in Burbank, HBO Chairman Richard Plepler in New York, and Turner Chairman John Martin in New York_should breathe easier. And Bewkes expects to hang around for awhile, too.
"We have both been really focused on keeping all of the Time Warner executives _ the business executives and the creative executives," Bewkes said.
The two companies expect it to take more than a year for Washington regulators to review the benefits and shortcomings of the deal before approving or rejecting it.
That means the AT&T probably won't take control of Time Warner until sometime in 2018. Bewkes, who is 64, said he agreed to step down _ but only after a transition period of undetermined length.
That's a departure from other recent deals.
When Comcast acquired NBCUniversal in 2011, it swiftly installed new managers. Comcast executive Steve Burke replaced Jeff Zucker as chief executive of NBCUniversal. (Now, Zucker runs CNN, which is owned by Time Warner.)
Charter Communications bought the much larger Time Warner Cable in May. Time Warner Cable CEO Rob Marcus left immediately. (Time Warner Cable was a separate company from Time Warner Inc.). This summer, when Comcast acquired DreamWorks Animation for $3.8 billion, a key provision of the agreement was for DreamWorks' co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg to leave. Now, longtime Comcast executive Jeff Shell is responsible for DreamWorks Animation.
