You pays your money and you takes your chances. Paramount has not looked like a good bet for a long time.
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The Paramount Saga
- Thread starter michael hagerty
- Start date
Isn’t that the gamble when you play the stock market. Especially when you invest in volatile companies.
Never by stock in a company that one person controls most of the stock and can do whatever they want.
Plus a company that can’t make a profit.
I got the stock for free.
If your stock is in a 401 K that will come back to bite you in retirement. And it really wasn't "free" you worked for it.
I had a lot of Lucent stock recorded "free" for my 401K. I wished they would have gave me 50% of the value of the stock when issued in cash for my 401K instead of the stock.
If you inherited the stock, I'm sorry for you loss.
I had a lot of Lucent stock recorded "free" for my 401K. I wished they would have gave me 50% of the value of the stock when issued in cash for my 401K instead of the stock.
If you inherited the stock, I'm sorry for you loss.
And worth very penny! (I should talk; I got Sears options in 1998. Didn't amount to much. They also had an ESPP but I didn't understand a lot about those things then, so I stayed away from it.)
One of my rules of investing is never to buy stock in a publicly-traded company with multiple classes of stock, where at least one class having super-voting rights. That makes it abundantly clear that the only role for ordinary investors is to provide capital to the company without getting much of a voice in how it's run. This also has had the beneficial side effect of keeping me from buying stocks in media companies, where multiple classes stock are common.
Sure, the typical election of a board of directors is run on the same general principle as a Soviet election, minus the purges. Once in a while, though, when a company is so obviously badly run that vulture investors start circling, the individual shareholders' votes suddenly matter a lot more.
For a while in the early 2000s, I had Chicago Tribune stock. Interesting enough, it did not have multiple share classes. The purchase of that stock gave me a window into where the media industries were going. It just wasn't a growth field, despite protestations to the contrary. The stock just kind of sat there, and I got rid it after a couple of years.
The plan should have been constructed such that you could sell the stock right away - this was part of the post-Enron reforms where so many Enron employees lost a lot of wealth due to keeping it in Enron stock. I once worked for a company that matched 401k contributions in company stock. But I also had the right to sell it the moment it landed in the 401k (vesting was instantaneous in that plan). It also paid dividends, so I would hold onto it up to the next dividend date, then sell it. That company has since moved to regular cash contributions for its match.
Unfortunately this was pre Enron.
Billionaire Edgar Bronfman drops out of the bidding for Paramount:
www.latimes.com
Bronfman drops out of Paramount bidding; Skydance to claim prize
Edgar Bronfman Jr. said Monday night that he was dropping out of the auction, saying "We congratulate the Skydance team."
www.latimes.com
Paramount may sell part of its station portfolio: Paramount hires bank to weigh sale of 12 independent TV stations
That was part of the speculation back in July:
What's interesting is that it appears they'll keep one of theirs---KCAL. Given the expense involved in branding both Channel 2 and Channel 9's news product as KCAL---and the revenue KCAL generates with hours of local news, I suppose that makes some sense.
if KTXA is sold as part of this plan, i could see TEGNA being the likely buyer, but only if KMPX is sold (which is part of the plan after the signal switch of KMPX's current UHF digital signal and WFAA's current VHF digital signal) and KTXA becomes WFAA's sister station once KMPX is sold off. maybe a company with ties to TEGNA buys it out and it becomes a de facto sister to WFAA in the short term via LMA then when KMPX is sold off, WFAA/TEGNA can buy out it outright.
I'm surprised that CBS would want to sell the duopolies I get the indies that aren't CBS O&Os they would want to sell that. But why Detroit, Boston, Dallas etc. I get NYC because old management wanted to get a club membership for golf, why didn't they just sell those TV channels during spectrum auction years ago and put those channels on sub-channels.
KCCW isn't an independent, it is a CBS satellite of WCCO in Walker, MN, way outside of the true Minneapolis market reach. I'm sure it doesn't make much money for them, but it serves an important role in that part of Minnesota. Anyone buying it would have to change it to an independent station, unless they could redo the markets, as Alexandria/Walker used to be their own market until WCCO bought the two stations. KCCO from Alexandria was sold off a few years ago in the spectrum repack.
Not sure if I like the name of company purchasing stations.
“According to the F.C.C. application, Sayonara — a media company controlled by the Lawrence J. Ellison Revocable Trust — will attain control of Paramount’s licensed television broadcast stations. Control of those stations, which rely on public airwaves, is scrutinized by government regulators. Larry Ellison is listed as the owner of that trust.”
www.nytimes.com
“According to the F.C.C. application, Sayonara — a media company controlled by the Lawrence J. Ellison Revocable Trust — will attain control of Paramount’s licensed television broadcast stations. Control of those stations, which rely on public airwaves, is scrutinized by government regulators. Larry Ellison is listed as the owner of that trust.”
Larry Ellison Will Control Paramount After Merger
An F.C.C. filing shows that companies affiliated with Mr. Ellison will own most of the voting interest currently held by Shari Redstone.
Reminds me of the Aloha Trust, the holding tank into which iHeart tossed struggling properties until someone could come up with the money to take them off their hands. I always thought the name had been chosen because "aloha" can mean goodbye.
As is the case in large APAs, there are often numerous legal business entities that are created as temporary vehicles to handle various aspects of asset transfer. These often will be given a name. Once the acquisition is complete, many if not all of these might go away. I suspect that the executives and lawyers involved will use somewhat whimsical or humorous names just to provide a little relief from what are otherwise mountains of dreary word salad in legal documents.
Having said that, it is quite possible that Paramount will be dumping the broadcast O&Os as being irrelevant to the larger business model going forward.
And when they do, the buying company will find itself in a similar situation as Citadel, Cumulus, and Audacy did, burdened with debt and expense that they never encountered in other stations they own. They'll be divorced from the content creation business that supports their prime-time line-up, and they'll end up being a repeater, just like other TV companies. All of this will further the end of the linear TV business as we know it.
The irony is that CBS sold its radio stations for the same reason, and it ended up bankrupting the buyer and not helping the seller in the long run. Both companies were weakened after the sale. The thing that makes these companies what they are is their diverse portfolio. The way they worked in the past was to get the assets to support each other and work together as a team. Once the assets are sold off, the company loses the synergies that made it so powerful.