Word: worldcom
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...they ever. Just ask MCI. In a bid that would mark the biggest corporate buyout in U.S. history, the country boy from Canada by way of Mississippi last week offered $30 billion in WorldCom stock for MCI, the country's second largest long-distance carrier and a company four times the size of WorldCom. The bid demolished British Telecommunication's $18.7 billion offer for MCI just as the two phone giants were preparing to seal their transatlantic deal. It also shattered BT's plan to make the MCI merger the focus of its global strategy, a consequence that didn...
Just last month he agreed to pay $1.2 billion for the CompuServe online service, keeping CompuServe's Internet hookups and swapping its consumer subscribers for the hookups of America Online. That gave WorldCom, which has made some 50 acquisitions in little more than a decade, a broader range of telecom assets--from local and long-distance lines to high-speed Internet-access networks--than even mighty AT&T. Adding MCI would balloon WorldCom's revenues from $4.5 billion in 1996 to nearly $28 billion and make the company, based in Jackson, Miss., by far the leading challenger...
...smart as a fence post. Around the office, his style is faded jeans, cowboy boots and turquoise jewelry. "Our personality is to be very loose. We aren't stuffed- shirt people," he says. His colleagues know him better. "Don't fall for that 'Aw shucks' stuff," says John Sidgmore, WorldCom's cerebral vice chairman and the architect of its strategy for dominating access to the Internet. "Bernie's extremely street smart. Most of all, he has a vision for the company. He's extremely aggressive and simply wants to build the biggest company in the industry...
...Ebbers was ripe for the kind of transformation that business legends are made of. In a Days Inn diner in Hattiesburg, Miss., goes WorldCom lore, Ebbers and some partners scratched out on a napkin a plan for a phone company that would resell WATS long-distance service to local businesses. The name for the company--Long Distance Discount Services--supposedly came from a helpful waitress. "The only experience Bernie had operating a long-distance carrier was that he used the phone," recalls an investor in the original enterprise, which changed its name to WorldCom...
...banging away against the giants for one account at a time. His strategy was to string together local carriers that sold long distance to business users, cutting overhead and paying for the acquisitions with his company's stock. His plan worked so well that anyone who invested $100 in WorldCom stock when the company went public in 1989 would today have a holding worth more than $3,000--by far the best showing in the telecom industry and one of the biggest advances for any U.S. company. His 1.8% stake in WorldCom is worth some $600 million...