ATT doesn’t have that kind of cash. They are getting it from the Fed Reserve at 0%.
It’s a good time to borrow if you’re a dinosaur corp but such easy free money makes for abject stupidity.
CNN/Turner are not worth 1/1000th what ATT is borrowing to pay for them.
Regardless of the blatant move to give control of America’s internet away, CNN/Turner companies along with ATT are going to die soon enough. They offer no value for the dollar. They are already dead, they just don’t know it yet.
ATT is not sliding off the boards any time soon
CNN/Turner are not worth 1/1000th what ATT is borrowing to pay for them.
then you wonder what else is going on behind the scenes.
I know there are various ways to place a market value on any business. I don’t know how they place a value on the business entity known as Cable News Network. They probably don’t have a lot of business assets; property plant and equipment, etc. Much of their value probably comes from their being an established network with a base number of viewers, which in turn can attract advertisers to support their business. But I don’t know how to plug all that into a spreadsheet to come up with the market value of CNN.
But, to your point, if they are paying far about any reasonable market value for these networks, something else must be going on, for them to pay far more than what those business properties are worth.
Disagree that AT&T is a dinosaur.
They have vast telecom networks that have big value. And if they can buy a content company or two, they will have diversified their portfolio as Comcast has done.
Verizon is in the same boat trying to buy Yahoo.
The internet is worth nothing without the physical infrastructure underneath. And a Google or Amazon or Microsoft has no desire to manage the ugliness under the Internet Protocol layer.