Feb. 15–What? Who? A cable company in Philadelphia trying to take over the Walt Disney Co.?
Comcast Corp. going after Disneyland, ABC television, Snow White, Nemo, and other stars from the nation’s number-one movie studio? Comcast chief executive Brian Roberts taking on, and maybe bringing down, Michael Eisner, the Disney boss who started the whole CEO-as-celebrity thing?
Casual observers were shocked by Roberts’ play for Disney on Wednesday, stunned by its brashness and — given Disney’s internal troubles and its shareholder meeting in Philadelphia in two weeks — by its exquisitely brutal timing. The $66 billion deal could make Comcast the world’s biggest media company.
Comcast? Brian Roberts as king of all media? Who are these guys?
“I swear to God, if these people were to move 93 miles north, people would be begging for them,” said Jim Cramer, a former hedge-fund manager who is a Philadelphia native and CNBC television host. “Because they’re from Philadelphia and not from New York and Goldman Sachs, they have no respect. What do they have to do to get people to take them seriously?”
Roberts is the anti-glamour media boss. He’s been in the ring with Bill Gates, John Malone, Ted Turner, all of them, but few people would recognize him outside the pages of a business magazine. His company owns two sports teams — the Flyers and 76ers — but his name never shows up in the sports section.
He prefers to mind his own business, and does that very well. He’s an intense competitor — a college All-American squash player — who will work every angle to defeat an opponent, then try to leave things on a good note. Terry McGuirk, vice chairman of Time Warner’s Turner Broadcasting and an occasional golf partner, said the scary thing is, “I think Brian is playing less and getting better.”
He’s also a family guy who begged to work for his father, Comcast founder Ralph J. Roberts, after graduating from Wharton in 1981. He spent years working his way up the company ladder to dispel perceptions of nepotism.
And never mind his own glamour, or lack thereof — he acts as if he’s not even attracted to it. His spin on the idea of buying Disney, though surely meant to dispel the idea that he puts any premium on the Disney aura, isn’t about how cool it would be to control the Magic Kingdom.
“This is the next logical step for the company,” he said Friday — and that’s pretty much all he says about it.
“He is not … putting himself out in the limelight, in the headlines,” said John Alchin, Comcast’s co-chief financial officer. “He’s far more focused on the company, on doing deals, on creating shareholder value. That’s what he’s really like.”
So anyone thinking the blitzkrieg Disney bid is out of character for Roberts just doesn’t know the 44-year-old cable king very well. They may not know about 1997, when Roberts, after Microsoft’s Bill Gates complained that cable companies were offering Internet service too slowly, spontaneously challenged Gates at a Seattle event to put some money into the cable industry. The jibe prompted Gates to invest $1 billion in Comcast and made Roberts the cable world’s hero.
They may not know about 1994, when Brian and his father intercepted media mogul Barry Diller, their partner in shopping channel QVC, as he got off his private jet on an airport tarmac in New Jersey — and torpedoed a Diller deal that might have have put him in charge of CBS television network, in order to preserve their hold on QVC.
They may not know that Comcast grew tenfold in the 1980s, while Brian was learning the ropes. In 1986, the company doubled in size overnight acquiring cable systems from Westinghouse, and two days after the deal was done Ralph Roberts assembled his executives and asked, “What’s gonna be next?”
And they may not know about 2001, when Comcast initiated its hostile bid for AT&T’s cable systems by faxing its intentions to AT&T Chairman C. Michael Armstrong as he vacationed over the July 4 holiday with his grandchildren in Nantucket.
Armstrong wanted to brush the missive aside, Stephen B. Burke, Comcast’s cable division president, recalled later. “We said: ‘Well, we’ve already sent it to 1,000 members of the media, and it’s on the Internet,’ ” Burke said.
“They’ve got a keen sense of timing,” said Glenn Jones, whose Jones Intercable owned dozens of cable systems until 1999, when “Ralph called me … to say he wanted to have breakfast. I thought: ‘How nice to have breakfast with my friend Ralph Roberts.’ “
In the morning, Ralph Roberts told Jones he had set a takeover in motion. “He said: ‘We want to issue a press release, but I didn’t want to do it without you being involved.’ “
Brian Roberts was bred for this, more or less literally. His father founded Comcast in the early 1960s and quickly began building it from a single 1,800-subscriber antenna in Mississippi to a nationwide collection of cable systems.
Like Tiger Woods grabbing a golf club as a toddler, Brian Roberts began his grooming early. At age 7, he spent weekends at Comcast’s headquarters, then in Bala Cynwyd, stamping subscriber payment booklets.
As a teenager, Roberts watched his father negotiate contracts. Summers, he did door-to-door cable sales and climbed poles as an installer. He ran the local cable system in Trenton. At age 29, as a budding Comcast executive, he joined the board of Turner, along with Ted Turner, John Malone and Gerald Levin.
“That was not a forum for ‘trying out.’ It was the major league,” McGuirk said. “But whenever he spoke, these real titans in the industry sat and listened.”
Turner, a longtime friend of the Roberts family — Turner once asked Ralph Roberts whether he would be his pallbearer — has said, “I’ll bet my last dollar on Brian Roberts.”
When Brian Roberts was 31, his father made him president of the company and began the process of transferring to him a controlling share of Comcast stock. He’s now worth nine figures, as CEO of a Fortune 200 company, with annual compensation topping $8 million.
Through it all, at the side of his father, Roberts learned to negotiate. Geraldine Laybourne, CEO of Oxygen Media and a former Disney executive, has recalled the Robertses persuading Disney bosses Eisner and Robert Iger to co-invest with Comcast in the E! Entertainment channel in 1997. Disney was merely exploring the idea; the Robertses wanted Disney to put up the lion’s share of the price and give Comcast control of the channel.
“Bob and I thought it was crazy,” Laybourne said. “These guys had an act together that was unbelievable. Brian would conduct all of the conversations in the room, and they would go out of the room and confer.”
By night’s end, the Robertses got the investment they wanted from Disney — plus control of the channel.
“Ralph preaches that deals should be win-win. The other side should feel that they beat you in the end, so they want to do business with you again,” Brian said in a 2002 interview while waiting for the government to approve the AT&T deal.
Rivals and friends say Brian inherited his father’s ability to mix low-key charm and pit-bull deal-making.
“I don’t think Brian has ever left anything on the table. But he doesn’t overfill his plate,” said Leo Hindery, chief executive of the YES Network sports channel and former head of AT&T’s cable business.
“We could bang heads and negotiate hard but always have a good relationship,” said Greg Maffei, the former chief financial officer at Microsoft who negotiated the company’s investment in Comcast. “Brian’s playing for a long-term win.”
Though Comcast may rely on Brian Roberts’ lightning strikes to ignite its takeover attempts, the way he wins isn’t through razzle-dazzle, but through head-down, bearlike persistence. The AT&T deal took more than two years to complete.
Disney, as big a deal as it may be, is just another deal.
“I would think that the way Brian would look at this is the same way he looked at QVC, the same way he looked at cellular,” Alchin said. “This is an opportunity to do a deal that would be great for Comcast shareholders. It would require that he get a great team of managers to do the job and then he would be back in the business of finding the next opportunity for Comcast shareholders.
“It would be very out of character for him to put himself in the spotlight and become more of a celebrity type of executive. That’s just not who and what he is.”
Staff writers Miriam Hill and Patricia Horn contributed to this article.
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