Thread by @TheRedTerra

🧵#WGAstrong I see scattered #AMPTP shills claiming the #WGA is demanding too much at the wrong time and the executives don't care about our strike and we aren't hurting them and blah blah blah. Maybe. I doubt that, but sure, maybe. BUT...

Maybe these CEOs can't see the damage WE are doing to them because they're doing so much more damage to their own companies and shareholder value that our damage isn't quite as visible yet? I mean, just look at the semi-recent history of Warner Bros. alone…

In 2000, Steve Case, the CEO of AOL, saw that he would soon lose his singular hold on getting average folks onto the internet. Cable companies had swarmed into the internet service market, browsers & email programs had caught up and surpassed AOL's offerings…

So if you run a dying company whose stock value is the very definition of internet dot-com stock bubble valuation… the question becomes "how to turn this imaginary money into real money before my bubble bursts?" Answer: use the fantasy to buy a real company with real value!

Case used AOL's ludicrously inflated stock value to execute a leveraged buy-out of Time-Warner, Inc. for $165 Billion, the biggest-ever corporate merger at that time. An ungodly amount of debt, but debt that Case had a plan to get rid of: fire sales & scams!

2003: AOL-WB sold Warner Music for $2.6B cash.
2009: Time-Warner Cable spun off into a separate company taking with it $30B of AOL-WB's debt.
2014: Time, Inc. Magazines spun off, taking $5B of AOL-WB's debt.
2014: AOL splits off into a separate company, taking $20B more in debt.

2015: AOL sold to Yahoo for $5B
2016: Time-Warner Cable acquired by Charter for $86B
2017: Time Inc. sold for $2B cash

That's $161B of AOL's $165B debt zeroed out by spinning off & selling chunks of Warner Bros.

2018: AT&T acquires the pared-down Warner Media for $85.4B

So AOL transformed $165B in smoke into $226B in actual value, and all they had to do was fire tens of thousands of people, ruin thousands of lives, flim-flam investors... all while paying billions to the scam artists who were running the company into the ground.

This is vulture capitalism: buy healthy companies with borrowed money, chop them up & sell them to pay off the buyer's debt, fire everyone, raise prices, steal all the profits, and then dump the company's corpse on the market. WALL STREET warned us all.

In 2022 Discovery Networks borrowed $44 billion and bought Warner Bros. In April 2022, David #Zaslav took control of the new $60B "Warner Bros. Discovery."

It's worth $31B today.

$29 Billion in stock value has been lost in 14 months.

Fire sales & scams will likely start soon.

Hundreds of Billions of dollars have been swindled out of this company in just 23 years. Tens of thousands of employees have lost their jobs. Prices were raised and raised again. Millions of investors & thousands of pension funds were burned by these corporate raiders.

It used to be that leveraged buyouts, corporate megamergers, stock buy-backs, and other such shenanigans were illegal. The government was here to rein in out-of-control corporations. Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush & Obama did away with all of that. Now theft is business.

David Zaslav has paid himself $500 million in the last 5 years. That's $2 million/week. Meanwhile, employees are being slashed, shows are disappearing, and he's crying poverty to the WGA. What's next? Chunks of the company will be spun off, taking debt with them, and then sold.

So yeah, maybe they can't yet feel the damage the WGA is doing to their bottom line… but only because they're doing SO VERY MUCH MORE damage themselves. But it will catch up with them. They'll bail out of their failing corporations after indebting them to the eyeballs.

Those company chunks will be bought by the other remaining mega-distributors. Our employer pool will shrink again. Consumer choice will again go down even as costs go up, even as jobs are ruthlessly cut to pay for the CEO's new megayacht.

The answer to all of this is anti-trust enforcement, break up vertical monopolies, reimpose the Fin-Syn laws of the 1950s-90s (which produced billionaire writers like Aaron Spelling), raise corporate taxes, & reimpose post-WWII tax rates which took 99% of income over $25 million.

After all, there's no point in swindling $250 million dollars in pay if Uncle Sam takes 99% in taxes on $225 million of it. No point in paying a CEO $250 million if you can't deduct it from your corporate taxes. No point in paying him in shares if stock buybacks are illegal.

We used to have this stuff. It wasn't built overnight, but it WAS destroyed almost overnight; Carter's deregulation, Reagan's tax cuts, Clinton's deregulation & oversight cuts, Bush's tax cuts & gutting of anti-trust, and Obama's corporation-friendly hands-off approach.

Trump was Trump. We expected nothing better. But he didn't run on a populist message of reining in corporate power. Biden & the Democrats did, and we need to hold them to those promises, not cluck our tongues and look the other way when Union Joe shafts railroad unions.

So are WRITERS being greedy? What a ludicrous question in the face of the history of this ONE company in the last 23 years. The CEO class has stolen more from media companies this year alone than the entire WGA will cost them over the next 6 years.

So talk to the Millennial writers on the picket lines. A lot of them don't bother voting because they've never seen a government in their lifetimes that doesn't suck. But our great-grandparents built one, and it could be good again. And Gen Z is here, angry and voting. #WGAstrong

Anyway, as Emile Zola once wrote a friend, "Sorry for the long letter, I didn't have the time to write a short one."

A joke only writers get.

See you on the picket lines!

@davidschasteen @geekbroll Another visual interpretation of the same data. I wouldn’t have gone with green, myself. Makes it seem “good” somehow. Red would have made more sense.

@ThePeterBriggs Severance somehow costs $22 million per episode. Guy Fieri only costs the Food Network $26/year and he’s starring in and producing SIX series for them. And he’s their biggest star. I bet the B and C team hosts only earn $10,000/episode. Those shows cost Discovery nothing.

Jesus, this thread is only 3 days long and we already have signs of a Fire Sale; msn.com/en-us/money/co…

More fire sales and debt offload scams will be emerging sooner rather than later due to the colossal failure of The Flash this weekend. It's going to lose at least $150 million. By comparison, Discovery's biggest Reality TV loss ever was probably in the $10 million range.

Remember: these execs killed a standalone Batgirl movie in order to get a $90M tax-write-down. They would have been better off burying The Flash and taking its $300M tax-write-down and releasing the movie with a star they could promote. They are bad at this.

Two more movies to go in the DC filmic universe which were already in production before they handed James Gunn the keys to the kingdom. It'll be interesting to see if audiences can be convinced to turn out for films set in an interconnected universe that's about to die.

This marks the third major disappointment in a row for them; Black Adam, Shazam: Fury of the Gods, and The Flash, with Blue Beetle & Aquaman 2 yet to come. The reality show execs at Discovery must be swallowing Maalox by the bottle at the red ink flowing from WB's books.

More fire sales, job losses, and scams coming into view. Every leader at TCM just got terminated. Do I sense a library sale approaching?

Every day brings another #Zaslav fire sale. He is not here to operate #WarnerBros. as an ongoing business, he’s here to kill it and sell chunks of its corpse and pay himself billions. #WGAstrong #WGA variety.com/2023/music/new…