Adventures in Mergers

As regular readers of this blog understand I am not a big fan of most mergers. The HP-Compaq deal is an example of the kind of idiocy that agents take outside of the interests of shareholders and even employees. But in today's LA Times there is a story about a new venture by another greed bug - this time former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin. Levin and Steve Case cooked up a deal to merge Time Warner - the legacy media company, with AOL - the then flailing giant of new media. It was not as silly a deal as the HP-Compaq deal - although most postmortems suggested that Levin and Case convinced the markets, albeit temporarily of the tremendous synergies and goodwill inherent in the combination.

But it turns out that after Levin got booted, he and a partner started a clinic called Moonview Sanctuary, a place to fleece other folks who have too much money (the fee is a cool $175K annually) or too little brains. Levin is a "spiritual advisor" with such words of wisdom as "You feel blissful. A lot of people would cry but not out of sadness......" There is 12 step and eye movement desensitization and art therapy and a raft of other real and imagined therapies. The place sounds like one of the many places in California that give us the reputation of being the Granola state. Wouldn't it serve Levin's conscience just to give back some of the booty that his grandiose plans and schemes back to the shareholders who got screwed in the process of merger.