Yeah well Time Warner or parts of it and precursor / successor outfits have now been involved in two deals that Wall Street loathed from the get go and that did not work out anywhere near as well as the originators boasted they would at the time. Remember the AOL-TW merger and all the talk of "synergy"? That thing was rightly tagged as the worst deal in the history of mergers and acquisitions... until AT&T decided to give it a shot!
There's something about those content libraries and production capabilities that just seem too good to be true in prospective dealmaking.... and twice now they have ended up BEING too good to be true after the paperwork is cut.
Not to trivialize either geopolitical wars or financial ones, and not to politicize this thread, but efforts to maximize value of Time Warner / Warner Media (and the spun off bits of those in the meanwhile) can remind one of how the world once watched France bollix trying to get Indochina under control, and then watched the US step in to say "watch how it's done, guys"... Maybe all this stuff is backwards and it's Warner Media that should declare itself off limits and stick to making deals for production and licensing. Kinda like Vietnam said ya know what, y'all get outta here and we'll decide who runs this outfit and for what purpose: stop by and shop our products and labor markets later on!
If Apple had bought TW it's possible they could have done something with it that neither AOL nor later AT&T thought to try, but if you ask me they were right to back away. There is such a thing as buying more pizza than you can eat, and the leftover pieces of a corporate acquisition are not as much fun (or manageable) as leftover pizza. I like it that so far Apple has moved into content creation instead.
