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That's according to the Times of London, which reports today that the Time Warner CEO is ready to hand over the top job to Jeff Bewkes as early as next week. That's a bit sooner than had been expected. The TW board apparently discussed the handover at a meeting this week in London. (A TW spokesman denied the Times of London report.) Okay, so while no official decision has been made, there's little doubt that Richard Parsons is ready to step down, and Bewkes is ready to step up. “When you find the right person to take over,” he told the NYT's Joe Nocera back in August, “and that person is ready to rock ‘n’ roll, you’ve got to get out of the way.” Rock 'n' roll indeed - Bewkes is considered less sentimental than Parsons, so there are all kinds of reports about a major shakeup in the works – including the Warner Brothers operation out here. Anyway, it's an end-of-an-era type story: Parsons held TW together after the disastrous AOL merger. Here's more from the Nocera column:
There are plenty of people on Wall Street who believe that Mr. Parsons doesn’t break a sweat — and that’s been the biggest problem in the five years he has been running Time Warner. Why hasn’t he followed the example of his fellow media mogul Rupert Murdoch, scooping up hot Internet companies like MySpace, and buying coveted brands like Dow Jones? Why hasn’t he spun off Time Warner Cable? Why can’t he figure out what to do about AOL? And why, oh, why can’t he get the stock price to rise? “At the beginning of 2005,” said Richard Greenfield, a media analyst with the independent firm Pali Research, “the stock was at 19. Right now, it’s around 18. When do they start taking shareholder value seriously? They have had long enough to make this thing work.” There is another view about Mr. Parsons’s tenure as Time Warner’s chief executive, though. According to this view, which is held almost universally within Time Warner, when he first took over the company, he performed nothing short of a miracle, rescuing it from the single worst deal in modern business history, the AOL-Time Warner merger.
The question, of course, is what now? He keeps denying rumors about an interest in running for mayor of NY - though whenever the announcement is made you can be sure those rumbles will resurface. He's only 60 and arguably the most prominent African-American in U.S. business (and in case you're wondering, he’s a Rockefeller Republican).
Mark Lacter created the LA Biz Observed blog in 2006. He posted
until the day before his death on Nov. 13, 2013.