Word: qvc
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Wall Street wasn't sure who would be boss, but it responded emphatically. The day the merger was announced, the stock of both CBS and QVC rocketed 19%. It pumped up a QVC stock value that had been cut sharply after the Paramount sortie. And it brought Tisch's company almost back to its May level, before CBS got a black eye by losing eight of its affiliate stations to Fox. CBS had also suffered wounds from an earlier affiliate raid by Rupert Murdoch, owner of the News Corp. (which includes the Fox network), and Revlon magnate Ronald Perelman...
...QVC merger were a TV series, then everything up to now would be just the pilot. Consider the potential plot twists. For a start, the CBS and QVC boards do not convene (separately) to discuss the merger until July 13. "It's not like the board is coming in tomorrow ratifying to do it," says a TV industry executive who is close to both Diller and Tisch. "It's not coming in for another 10 days! You got the July Fourth weekend -- what do you think is going to happen over that time? A lot of meetings. You can name...
...February, as Diller's Paramount proposal waxed, waned and went under, Daniel Tisch first broached the CBS-QVC deal to takeover lawyer Martin Lipton, one of whose clients was Diller. The chat with Lipton, says Danny Tisch, "wasn't done with Larry Tisch's okaying or not okaying. It was just saying, gee, if the Paramount-QVC transaction looks good, think about what a CBS-QVC fit would look like. Lots of sex appeal...
According to several sources, QVC's subsequent offer included a cash buyout of CBS, a move CBS declined. Then Diller, with Lipton and Herbert Allen of Allen & Co., whom Danny Tisch calls "the real financial architects of this transaction," rejiggered the proposal as a merger between equal parties. "Around June 10," recalls Danny, "we sat down -- my father, my brother Jimmy, who is executive vice president at Loews, and I -- with Marty Lipton. We didn't really come up with any negatives...
...would have to count a lot higher before you got to QVC. It is one of cable's quieter moneymakers: lots of cash, little cachet. In Diller's first year at QVC, its revenues rose 14%. John Malone, the zillionaire head of Tele- Communications, Inc., had lured Diller to the home-shopping network at the end of 1992, shortly after he left Fox. Perhaps there had been a dispute with Murdoch, his boss, over a Diller request for equity in the company; perhaps he was just tired, as he said, of working for other people...