Word: messier
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...together. Last week's talk of a $35 billion purchase of Canada's Seagram by France's Vivendi represents the latest human attempt to make some of these pieces click into a seamless, revenue-generating new-economy Tinkertoy. The toy boys in this deal, Vivendi CEO Jean-Marie Messier, 43, and Seagram CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr., 45, can't resist the urge to merge Vivendi's telephone company, Internet provider and cable system with Seagram's Universal Studios and Universal Music Group...
...head of this new media power, Vivendi's Messier, is a former civil servant who has undergone a new-economy makeover. When he took over the firm four years ago, it was primarily a water-and-waste management operator--who needs that kind of boring stuff in the new economy? Since then, he has been reconfiguring the company through a flurry of mergers and asset sales, shifting the product flow from water pipes to fat data pipes. After this deal goes through, he will probably spin off the remaining hydro assets to concentrate on whether or not he should green...
Sensing an opportunity, Messier approached Bronfman last October. Seagram possessed the kind of content-producing assets that Messier's distribution channels thirsted for. Talks between the two men heated up in January following word of the AOL-Time Warner deal. But the discussions nearly collapsed last spring, before both companies settled on a stock swap that would value Seagram at about $75 a share--a roughly $25 premium above its recent price...
Bagging Seagram would anoint Messier as a media mogul alongside the Murdochs and Redstones of the world. As Messier recently told TIME, "Fusing content and media [distribution] has been Vivendi's strategy since Day One." He says the merged entity will become "a totally integrated group with full control over its operations...
...comparison is appropriate, for the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli dispute will mirror the aftermath of the superpower rivalry, writ small. Once again the dangers will shift from big bloody wars between states or their surrogates to a bunch of smaller but messier and more persistent conflicts within countries. But don't be fooled. The stakes will be just as high over the next quarter-century as they were in the last, for the new disorder won't dissipate until the political map of the Middle East has been redrawn...