John Stankey is on a corporate combat mission to prove that AT&T leaders were right to spend $130 billion-plus on transformative acquisitions of Time Warner and DirecTV over the past four years…
’s content and DirecTV’s pay-TV platform. AT&T executives have been in “full war-room mode” at the company’s Dallas headquarters in the weeks since activist investor Elliott Management went public Sept. 9 with a detailed critique of the company’s present state.
Stankey’s elevation on Sept. 3 to AT&T president and chief operating officer, on top of his WarnerMedia duties, has set him on a clear path to take over for Stephenson. Vocal investor criticism of the company’s big strategic swings comes at an inopportune time for Stankey, who was instrumental in engineering both the $48.5 billion acquisition of DirecTV in 2015 and last year’s $85.4 billion purchase of Time Warner.
John Hodulik, telecom and media analyst for UBS, sees Greenblatt, the seasoned TV veteran who was named WarnerMedia Entertainment chairman in March, as the logical choice to take on more responsibility at the content arm. Stankey had been expecting to succeed Stephenson within another year or two, a source close to the situation says. Stankey is not happy about the prospect of giving up the reins of WarnerMedia so soon after the post-acquisition reorganization plan was laid out, a knowledgeable source says. The former Time Warner companies — HBO, Warner Bros. and Turner — have seen radical changes at the top and structurally this year as AT&T wraps its arms around the high-priced acquisition.
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