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Technology Stocks : AUTOHOME, Inc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TokyoMex who wrote (2796)	9/15/1998 1:09:00 AM
From: E. Graphs	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

Eating the Canary .......pretty fun reading! worth.com >>You'd expect John Malone to have a soft spot in his heart for Ma Bell. AT&T was his first employer after he finished college in 1963 with a double major in electrical engineering and economics. And he was enough of a star at Bell Labs that AT&T funded his two master's degrees, in electrical engineering and industrial management, and his Ph.D., in operations research (sounds squishy, but it's a combination of math and engineering). Now comes the biggest grant of them all...... >>Yet if Malone has the fuzzies for AT&T, they almost certainly played no role in the latest deal. Nor will they in any way prevent him from hanging up if he thinks he's not wringing as much as he possibly can from the company. For Malone is a relentless negotiator, someone for whom deal making seems to be as vital--and unemotional--as swimming is for sharks. One might even wonder whether wrangling the deal itself is more gratifying for Malone than actually following through on it...... >>So, should this apparent bonanza for Malone fall through, well one gets the sense he'll just go and do another--or many others. Haggle till you drop, or something like that. His history says as much. According to one estimate, TCI under Malone has averaged an acquisition every two weeks for more than 20 years. For most of TCI's deals, especially the large ones, he handles the negotiations himself....... >>His high-school classmates nicknamed him the Bat, Al Gore called him Darth Vader and likened him to the Godfather, and all sorts of folks inside and outside the government have tarred him as a monopolist (Viacom accused him in a 1993 antitrust suit--later withdrawn--of grabbing monopoly power by "using bully-boy tactics and [the] strong- arming of competitors, suppliers and customers"). But what makes a deal maker successful, apart from the desire to do deals? In contemplating John Malone, there are three things to bear in mind. First, while Dr. Malone is a bright and clever fellow (and he's got the serious degrees from the likes of Yale, NYU, and Johns Hopkins to prove it), what's important is that everyone else is sure he's smart--legendarily and frighteningly so, in the estimation of most. Second, he is deeply in love with his wife, Leslie, whom he met as a teenager and married straight out of college. Third, he's lucky.......<<