Gerald Levin

Gerald M. Levin, a “visionary” media executive, who ran the world’s largest media company, Time Warner, and became an architect of its merger with America Online, widely considered the worst corporate marriage in American history, died on Wednesday March 13 2024. He was 84. When the deal was announced on Jan. 10, 2000, Time Warner was the world’s largest media company, and America Online was the largest internet company, with a combined market value of roughly $342 billion (the equivalent of about $625 billion today). The merger’s failure was swift and unmerciful. AOL’s stock price slid more than 30 percent between the deal’s announcement iand its approval that December by the Federal Trade Commission, pushing AOL’s proposed $165 billion purchase of Time Warner — in stock and assumed debt — down to $112 billion. By the start of 2002, AOL Time Warner’s market value was hovering around $127 billion and the company posted a net loss of $98.7 billion, a record for a U.S. company. Ted Turner, the company’s largest individual shareholder at the time of the merger, later told The New York Times that the deal had cost him 80 percent of his worth, about $8 billion. Mr. Levin resigned in 2002. in 1975, Mr. Levin helped change the television landscape when, as CEO of a regional pay-TV channel called Home Box Office, he persuaded its parent company, Time Inc., to transmit the network’s signal via satellite. The gambit, an industry first, made HBO available nationwide, just in time for the “Thrilla in Manila” prizefight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. Levin studied biblical literature and Christian philosophy at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1960. He received a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1963. After graduation, he went to work in New York for the international law firm Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett (now Simpson Thacher). In 1967, he took a job at the Development and Resources Corporation. In 1972, he moved to Sterling Communications in New York, an early cable-TV company, Levin was married three times: to Carol Needleman, Barbara Riley and, most recently, Laurie Perlman. All three marriages ended in divorce.In addition to his grandchild Jake Maia Arlow,, he is survived by four of his five children, Anna Nicholson and Laura, Leon and Michael Levin, as well as six other grandchildren. His son Jonathan, a popular 31-year-old public high school teacher in the Bronx, was murdered and robbed in his Upper West Side apartment in 1997.