Eighty billion dollars [in debt]. Eight zero. More important than the number is the reason that David Ellison was able to buy Warner Bros. was that the last owner couldn't deal with the debt that he took on to buy the company.
AT&T tried content plus pipes when it bought Time Warner. Verizon tried content plus pipes when it bought AOL and Yahoo, and, hell, AOL tried content plus pipes when it bought Time Warner in the early 2000s. You might notice a trend here — all of those deals ended in disaster.
A lot of these mega mergers over time don't prove valuable. I remember I first started covering media in the year 2000. That was the year that AOL acquired and ate Time Warner. And it was disastrous for both halves of that.
