Immelt's Fire Sale, MacKenzie's Zillion-Dollar Empire, and Digital Media's Roaring '20s

Happy Wednesday. Thanks for reading The Daily Courant, your afternoon guide to the latest and most important new journalism on offer at Puck.

Today, we lead off with William D. Cohan's gripping account of GE's portentous, “burn some furniture” fire sale of NBCUniversal to Comcast—a $30 billion, financial panic-fueled saga that may have cost Jeff Immelt a seat next to Reed Hastings and David Zaslav in the streaming video firmament.

Plus, below the fold, Brian Morrissey reports on the surprising economic enthusiasm underpinning Ben Smith and Justin Smith's ambitious efforts to take on Silicon Valley—and The New York Times—for international digital media supremacy.

The Worst Media Deal in History?

NBCUniversal is now probably worth well north of $100 billion—a significant chunk of Comcast’s $230 billion market value. So why did GE sell it for $30 billion a decade ago?

Back in October, I shared the story of the first professional masterstroke of David Zaslav, the new King of Hollywood, who was part of the team of legendary GE executives, along with Jack Welch and Bob Wright, who first saw the promise of cable television through their ownership of NBC. In 1989, with Wall Street still enduring one of its periodic post-crash malaises, NBC paid $140 million for half of Chuck Dolan’s Rainbow Properties, a goodie bag of cable assets that contained Bravo, AMC, and other sports broadcasting entities. Welch, Zaz’s mentor, also pushed for deals to acquire Court TV and The History Channel. Welch and Zaslav, among a few others, were also the driving forces behind the creation of both CNBC and MSNBC. When everyone else was playing the linear game, the GE executives foresaw the dawn of the next epoch. 

If GE was clever enough to see around the corners of network television, why wasn’t it able to envision the inevitable pivot toward streaming content over the Internet directly into our homes? This phenomenon, of course, has created behemoths out of the likes of Netflix, Disney, and Zaslav’s about-to-be merged company, Warner Bros. Discovery. In fact, streaming and the streaming wars are pretty much all anyone in Hollywood is talking about these days—and pretty much all that Wall Street is valuing in these companies—as my partner Matt Belloni has documented beautifully.

There are two main reasons for GE’s blind spot...

FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT