Rupert Murdoch wants to buy Time Warner, creating the world’s largest media companies. However, the targeted group coy – the bidding war is now likely start in earnest.

If Rupert Murdoch knocks – the fat checkbook in hand – remain a three options. First: Man hiding or pretending that you know nothing. Second: One of takes the bull by the horns and scares him. Third: It is pleased with the check.

Jett Bewkes, chief executive of the U.S. entertainment company Time Warner (CNN, HBO, Warner Brothers), initially opted for option number one. As the industry magazine “Variety” on rumors spoke to him last week, media mogul Murdoch wanted to buy Time Warner, he gave himself clueless: “I know nothing.”
Meanwhile Bewkes has arrived at option number two. So persistent were the rumors, so thin denials that he sent on Wednesday a two and a half minute video on its approximately 34,000 employees, in which he confirmed the suspicions grudgingly.

Yes, Bewkes said Murdoch’s conglomerate 21st Century Fox had submitted an “unwanted Offer” in fact. But Time Warner’ve politely declined: A takeover by Murdoch was “not in the best interests” of the house, its employees and shareholders.

One of the last dinosaur battles in the U.S. media industry is thus held in public. Murdoch vs. Bewkes, Fox vs. Time Warner: Two sore giant watch each other. Both is not just about money but also about their heritage. And that is why to overcome a botched past.

Especially for the 83-year-old Murdoch much is at stake: It would be the biggest – and perhaps last – Deal of his career. This is rich in spectacular acquisitions, but tends to an end.

Murdoch bid for Time Warner:Murdoch wants to overhaul the U.S. media landscape

Infamous for his Shopaholic, the did not stop themselves from sacred cows such as the “Wall Street Journal”, the native Australians had recently come in for quite a setback. The British hacking scandal, the splitting of his group, the sudden bachelorhood after divorce: His old days would have been better.

A shopping trip would be there again exactly the right recipe against world-weariness and loneliness. The one run to the boutique. Rupert Murdoch buys corporations.

Give a handle to the Time Warner also be economically viable, not only from Murdoch’s point of view. The deal would completely change the American media landscape again.

The combination of the two companies would create the world’s biggest media giant and combine many of the most valuable U.S. objects under one roof: TV channels such as Fox News and HBO, Hollywood studios like 20th Century Fox and Warner Brothers, sports rights and sports channels.

Quite so surprising is not that both sides pretty already hold. Time Warner has skinned up to finally get rid of the Ruch with AOL in 2009 again undone chaos fusion, and repelled deficit crisis media, including the Time-Verlag.

Murdoch again severed his possession in the course of hacking scandal into two groups on: News Corporation for the publishing interests (“Wall Street Journal”, “New York Post”, Harper Collins) and 21st Century Fox for the rest of the media (film studios, Fox News). Time Warner would fill the latter of the two packets optimally.

Murdoch bid for Time Warner:The abrupt end of a lunch

His probe stretched Murdoch from the beginning of June. Chase Carey, President of 21st Century Fox and since 1988 in Murdoch’s services to met by information from the “New York Times” with Bewkes to a “private lunch” at the Time Warner Center, the corporate headquarters at Central Park, a few blocks from Murdoch its own headquarters at Sixth Avenue.

Murdoch’s offer: $ 80 billion. A merger would also save one billion U.S. dollars costs. Fox promise in maintaining the “most successful and creative” Manager of Time Warner.

However, Bewkes was rather irritated: “When Mr. Carey the offer raised the issue ended Mr. Bewkes the lunch abruptly, to consult with his board of directors”, stuck a participant in the “Financial Times”.

The Board advised exactly one months – and then pointed Murdoch from: An independent Time Warner promise “significant added value” for its shareholders. Even such a mega-merger would call the competition authorities on the scene. Here, Fox had offered to Time Warner’s CNN outsource any time rival of Fox News, via spin-off.

What now? Industry insiders believe that Time Warner has attracted the attention of other interested parties solely by Murdoch’s offer. Already is rumored that only the right – ie spendabelste – must come free. In conversation, among other things Google.
“I’ll keep you posted if there are new developments,” Bewkes assured the employees in his video.

Finally, he has still the number three option.

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