Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media. Michael Wolff
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were the new business culture. Forbes was the old.
But both old and new in the summer of 2002 were in bad shape. Fortune and BusinessWeek were certainly no fun anymore. And at Forbes, for the first time, they’d had to lay off staff, sell from the collections (those preposterous Fabergé eggs!), even ask senior execs to take pay cuts.
So, what if? What if the market didn’t soon recover? I couldn’t help wondering—my anticipation was growing. What if we continue to see corruption behind every boardroom door? What if I and other chattering sorts get to be socialists again? What if the pendulum has really swung as dramatically as that?
This was exciting: the collapse of monoliths, the end of business talk, a return to a cottage media industry (oddly, not unlike the Forbes company itself), the rise of new (old) values to complement a falling GDP (this really will be weird), and a new, widely shared antipathy for CEOs and fat cats everywhere (Cheney and Halliburton—ha!).
And it might well be, I thought, an exciting possibility for Tim Forbes (and for Steve and their brothers, Bob and Kip).
“If the world becomes more hostile to business, it just makes our job easier,” Tim said, with something like irony.
I would not say that there was, on the Forbes boat, exactly a mood of giddiness (or that the Forbeses have ever been giddy). But, possibly, something was in the air: a sense of renewed mission. Dennis Kneale, the Young Turk (at 44) who was brought in from the Wall Street Journal a few years ago as managing editor to liven things up, was energetically announcing a “Free Martha” campaign. There was a not unhappy sense of this being time to circle the wagons, of capitalism having to be defended once more from the hoi polloi.
“I do believe we do things right in this country,” Tim remarked, with, for him, a fair degree of passion.
It will, of course, not be the business culture that Forbes is defending but, rather, business itself. The Forbeses, too, may well take some pleasure in the collapse of monoliths, the end of business talk as a popular pastime (business talk, business secrets, should be the province of businessmen), and an affirmation of their own, standalone business model.
It occurs to me that while subscribing to the Forbes attitude might not have made businessmen more ethical, it would certainly have been wise on everyone’s part to play it, Forbes-style, a little more conservatively. Businessmen get into trouble not just because of accounting tricks but because they think they’re something more than faceless businessmen—whereas at Forbes, a businessman plays it close to the vest.
Yes. The arrivistes and wannabes screwed things up, but now the natural order may be righted.
On the yacht, you’ll have the true believers in capitalism (in their madras jackets), and on dry land, everyone else—hurling insults at them.
I began an email to Heilemann and Battelle on how this conference could be the first postbusiness conference. That that should be the subject here: What replaces business? What is the new energizing, organizing force?
What would all the ambitious guys do now?
I Was sorry there’d be no Bob Pittman at the conference. He had become—at least for a moment—one of the media business’ most significant entities.
This has to do with a certain cult of personality—he has a kind of suaveness which makes everybody else feel so small-time—but it also had to do with function. There was, everywhere, this sense of corporate limitations. As corporations got bigger and bigger, as indeed they all recommitted themselves to getting bigger and bigger still, there came the simultaneous understanding that bigness was paralyzing too. While you might be unassailable, you were also immovable.
Pittman was wily and foxy and came to be thought of as the person who could move the modern corporation. This wasn’t just because he was a smart manager or a brilliant salesperson (and he was the latter), but because he was rumored to have the touch.
To understand, in a way other managers did not, pop culture.
Certainly, he had the bona fides.
He was attended by the magic of being from out of town. He was a heartlander—not a medialand dweller. This implied a kind of oneness with the great rolling public out there. Indeed, he had an actor’s look—and what is an actor, if not a sculpted every-man?
He was almost Elvis-like. He came from the South and had come out of radio. There was no more basic American media than radio: teenagers and ad space.
Plus he had social abilities. More important even, he had media abilities. Great press surrounded him.
Social abilities, of course, were not necessarily distinct from media abilities (arguably, media abilities had become social abilities): Pittman and his wife would live for a period on Central Park West across the hall from Steve Shepard, who would become the editor of BusinessWeek. Shepard would come to conclude that Pittman was an exemplary manager and grant him favorable coverage for years to come, including the crowning cover story in BusinessWeek after the AOL Time Warner merger was completed.
And then, most of all, there was MTV.
Pittman either single-handedly invented the notion of a cable channel that would air (at no cost to itself) the promotional videos which had become popular for music acts, or he did not.
This has become like the scholarly wrangle that surrounds certain not-precisely-authenticated works of art. The dispute does not so much discredit Pittman as put him at the exact center, even if its details are disputed, of the most brilliant media development in postmodern memory.
After MTV was bought and Pittman exited, he founded the kind of enterprise that would become popular later: a no-company company, or a no-function company. Its product was Bob Pittman. We have Bob Pittman and you come to us with opportunities for Bob Pittman. It was like a Mafia thing. People lined up outside the door of Bob Pittman’s Quantum Media and were granted audiences with Pittman and, if he agreed to cooperate, then various terms were discussed wherein Bob Pittman lent you his approval.
You were then in business with Bob Pittman—or with Bob Pittman’s cachet.
Pittman’s model, his rabbi, his godfather, was Warner Communications’ Steve Ross. Pittman was to be the next-gen Ross, an entertainment executive with charisma (that is, salesmanship) and vision (that is, a sense of the next step, the next move, the audacious opportunity).
After MTV, and his brief, independent career, Ross brought him back into Warner, where he came to run the theme parks, and where, in a more controllable world, he might have succeeded Ross. The merger of Time and Warner in 1990 complicated that (the fight between the Ivy League-ish Time side and the unreconstructed Warner side would still be a company theme until the AOL merger) but made it a bigger prize—which Pittman might still have gotten, had not Ross died, of prostate cancer, in 1992.
With Ross gone, Pittman was a homeless gun.
He became the CEO of Century 21, the national real estate firm, intending, perhaps, to show that he was a manager for all seasons—all products, all services, all functions. (This is really a manager’s holy grail, to be able to manage anything at all.) But really, he had a country club air of underemployment.
Indeed, going to AOL in 1996 did not seem really any more directed than going into the residential real estate business—it was just Pittman casting about.
And yet suddenly, almost within weeks of his arrival, Pittman turned on the gas that would inflate and then explode the Internet bubble.
He took AOL from an hourly charge to a fixed-fee basis (i.e., from three-something an hour to $19.95 and all you can eat a month). This became