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Zucker’s Structure Wrinkle & OpenAI Open Questions

News and notes emanating from the finance-media-tech vortex: insights into Jeff Zucker and RedBird IMI’s debt-for-equity Telegraph offer and Microsoft’s governance peccadilloes.

Not only would a Jeff Zucker deal potentially kill the auction for the publications, it might also allow RedBird IMI to get the assets more cheaply than if they were bid up in a formal process.
Not only would a Jeff Zucker deal potentially kill the auction for the publications, it might also allow RedBird IMI to get the assets more cheaply than if they were bid up in a formal process. Photo: Ogut/Getty Images
William D. Cohan
November 29, 2023

Earlier this month, as loyal readers well know, Jeff Zucker’s RedBird IMI fund tendered a clever debt-for-equity offer to acquire The Telegraph and The Spectator by simply offering to pay down the roughly $1.4 billion of debt to Lloyds Bank that Sir Frederick Barclay, who owned the publications with his late twin brother, defaulted on earlier this year. This surprising bid froze the auction, run by Goldman Sachs, that featured all the usual suspects and added a new wrinkle to the most compelling British media-finance story in ages, at least since both the Financial Times and The Economist traded hands last decade.