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Gerald M. Levin, a “visionary” media executive, as he was often described, who became CEO of the world’s largest media company, Time Warner, and architect of its widely regarded merger with America Online. the worst corporate marriage in American history. , died on Wednesday. He was 84 years old.
Jake Maia Arlow, Mr. Levin’s grandson, confirmed the death at a hospital and said he lived in Long Beach, California. No other details were provided. Mr. Levin had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
Levin was the CEO of Time Warner when he and his counterpart at AOL at the time, Steve Case, masterminded what was then the largest corporate merger in American history. When the deal was announced on January 10, 2000, Time Warner was the world’s largest media company and America Online was the largest Internet company, with a combined market value of approximately $342 billion (the equivalent of about $600,000). millions of current dollars).
The merger, which created AOL Time Warner, was heralded as a watershed moment: the coming together of old and new media, a historic 20th-century American company whose origins trace back to publishing baron Henry Luce and Hollywood boss Jack Warner, coming together with a Virginia technology company for a tour of the World Wide Web. Rather, it became shorthand for the excesses of the turn-of-the-century dot-com bubble and the era of so-called synergy.
Richard Parsons, who succeeded Levin as CEO of AOL Time Warner in 2002, said in a phone interview for this obituary in 2022 that Levin was “one of the smartest guys in the media and entertainment space,” a “ visionary”. ”That he saw the digital wave coming and understood how the Internet would transform Time Warner’s business.
“He saw the merger with AOL as making Time Warner digital in one shot,” Parsons said. “What AOL brought to the game was instant access and competition in terms of how to access the Internet world.”
The failure of the merger was swift and ruthless. AOL’s stock price fell more than 30 percent between the deal’s announcement in January and its approval in December by the Federal Trade Commission, reducing AOL’s proposal to buy Time Warner for $165 billion. (in shares and assumed debt) to 112 billion dollars.
In early 2002, AOL Time Warner’s market value was around 127 billion dollars. That year, the company published a net loss of $98.7 billion, a record for an American company. Ted Turner, the company’s largest individual shareholder at the time of the merger, later told the New York Times that the deal had cost him 80 percent of its value, about $8 billion. Levin resigned in 2002.
The company dropped “AOL” from its name in 2003, and in 2009 Time Warner spun off the AOL unit to shareholders with a market capitalization of $3.5 billion.
Blame for the failure was placed on a variety of factors, including the bursting of the dot-com bubble, cultural differences between Time Warner and AOL, and, embodied by Levin and Case, a clash of egos. There were also accusations that AOL was not the company Time Warner thought it was linking up with. Before the deal was closed, AOL paid a $3.5 million fine in May 2000 after the Securities and Exchange Commission accused it of improperly inflating profits by hundreds of millions of dollars, an advance on what that would become a year-long accounting scandal that would entangle the new company.
“While I think it’s fair to criticize Jerry, it wasn’t a complete case of Jerry being all that wrong on the merits, as some of the facts about AOL’s appeal were – and let me say this very carefully – wildly exaggerated. . “Fay Vincent, a former commissioner of Major League Baseball who served on the board of directors of Time Warner and AOL Time Warner, said in a telephone interview. “Turns out we got on the wrong horse.”
A quarter-century before the AOL Time Warner disaster, Levin helped change the television landscape when, in 1975, as CEO of a regional pay-TV channel called Home Box Office, he convinced its parent company, Time Inc., to transmit the network signal via satellite. The tactic, an industry first, made HBO available nationwide, just in time for the “Thrilla in Manila” fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.
“Advocating for HBO to be on satellite was one of the most important decisions of my entire career,” Levin said in James Andrew Miller’s book “Tinderbox: HBO’s Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers” (2021). “The only way you get ahead is if you see something that no one else sees and it’s a little crazy. “Satellite at the time was a dream thing, but the idea of making HBO a national network instead of relying on a bunch of small cable networks was a pretty big idea.”
The success of the idea earned Levin the unofficial title of “resident genius” within Time Inc. and paved the way for national cable channels.
“It was Jerry Levin who revolutionized television when he was the first to use satellite transmission for programming,” said Barry Diller, the media mogul who is now chairman of IAC and Expedia Group, in a statement for this obituary, “and He had great resistance within Time Inc., but he persevered and ‘cable television’ was born.”
Later, as Levin rose through the ranks at Time, he was instrumental in the company’s merger with Warner Communications. As CEO of Time Warner, he orchestrated the company’s purchase of Turner Broadcasting System, bringing cable assets such as CNN, TBS and Cartoon Network into the company.
Miller, author of “Tinderbox,” said in an interview that Levin was “the last person central casting would have sent” to run the world’s largest media company. Levin, he said, didn’t fit into the “very Waspy, golf-focused establishment” that was Time. He was an intellectual who liked to quote the Bible and the French philosopher Albert Camus and lacked the sympathy of CEOs like Disney’s Robert Iger or Jeff Bewkes, the former head of Time Warner. But, Miller said, Levin could be “as tough as any of them.”
Levin was not a “people manager,” Parsons said, but rather an isolated thinker who cooked up ideas at home and then walked into the office and said, “This is what I think we should do. Now go and do it.”
“Most managers recognize that the really difficult part of the job is managing people,” Parsons added. “That wasn’t his bag.”
That management style did not sit well with employees at Time Warner’s headquarters in Midtown Manhattan.
“There are many CEOs who, despite being terrible human beings, engender intense loyalty in their employees,” Nina Munk, author of “Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner” (2004 ), he said in an interview. “But no one at Time Warner was willing to take a knife for Jerry Levin.”
Gerald Manuel Levin was born on May 6, 1939 in Philadelphia, son of David and Pauline (Shantzer) Levin. His father ran A. Levin Butter & Eggs, a business he inherited from his father; His mother was a housewife.
Although raised in a Jewish home, Mr. Levin also developed an interest in other religions from an early age. He studied biblical literature and Christian philosophy at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, from which he graduated in 1960. He received his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1963. After graduating, he went to work in New York for the law firm international. Simpson, Thacher and Bartlett (now Simpson Thacher).
In 1967, he accepted a job at the Development and Resources Corporation, an international non-governmental investment and management company, which took him to Iran to work on a dam project for more than a year. In 1972, he moved to Sterling Communications in New York, one of the first cable television companies, and worked on what was once known as “the Green Channel,” which changed the course of his life and career. of the.
“I had a life before HBO,” he told Miller for “Tinderbox.” “It was fascinating, but my real life began with HBO. It was my first kiss. “He was my first and greatest love.”
Mr. Levin was married three times: to Carol Needleman, Barbara Riley and, most recently, Laurie Perlman. All three marriages ended in divorce.
In addition to his grandson Jake Arlow, he is survived by four of his five children, Anna Nicholson and Laura, Leon and Michael Levin, as well as six other grandchildren. Her son Jonathan, a popular 31-year-old Bronx public high school teacher, was murdered and robbed in his Upper West Side apartment in 1997 by a troubled former student.
After Jonathan’s death, an incident that attracted widespread press coverage, Levin stayed home from the office for months. He would later say that the only reason he returned to Time Warner was because he felt a mission to do great things with the position he had. That big thing, he said in an interview for this obituary in 2022, became AOL Time Warner, a deal that, in his opinion, would make his son proud because he was “living for the next era.”
“He was a symbol of the modern era in terms of all the things we did: music, sports, philosophy,” he said, “and he implemented it with his students every morning.”