Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media

The business culture was just way too ingrained in careers and aspirations and relationships to be undone by what was, relative to the vastness of the American economy, just rounding-error-level corruption. We shared a moment’s amusement about the recent Wall Street Journal story naming this business era as the most corrupt since just before the Great Depression.

And yet that the Journal, of all places, could so easily be caught up in the antibusiness fever—partly, of course, trying to distance itself from the current mess—was precisely the point. It really could happen. It really could come apart. And not just the economy, but the central organizing faith of our time: that personal ambition, relentless salesmanship, financial savvy, and, well, greed were the most efficient and even liberal agents of societal advancement and harmony. All of that, almost in the blink of an eye, could go back to being not just uncool but really nasty stuff. Quite possibly, business would return to being the province of only bores and bad guys. Certainly, people everywhere were rushing for the doors (our M.B.A. president himself has seemed to be frantically searching for an exit from any identification with the business culture).

But Tim Forbes seemed much more awestruck than depressed by this possibility.

While such a turn of events, an epochal rejection of the business culture, might be a deeply dispiriting notion for his colleagues at Fortune and BusinessWeek and the Journal (not least because many of these people would want to participate in the repudiation), for Tim Forbes there was the possibility that this might be very good news.

“You know, we have always been,” Tim said, with a certain twinkle, “the magazine for true believers.”

If you go back twenty years, it would not at all be a prosaic thing to say I am a capitalist or I believe in unfettered markets or Government is too big. Rather, saying something like this would have defined you as a contrarian or country club member and, quite likely, a Forbes reader. I remember my own grim fascination with the Forbes motto, “Capitalist Tool”—it seemed so brazen and taunting.

To be a Forbes reader was not to have any sort of liberal or youthful or ambivalent impulses whatsoever. Dick Cheney surely read Forbes. Certainly, there wasn’t any greater cheerleader for the Reagan revolution than Forbes. Deregulation, laissez-faire capitalism, hands-off government, pro forma anticommunism, was Forbes stuff. Caspar Weinberger, Reagan’s secretary of defense, even became—and in some preserved-in-amber state remains—the ceremonial chairman of the company.

Nor was there any greater voice in the eighties for the sheer joie de vivre of wealth. Forbes’s “400 Richest Americans” issue, which debuted in the early Reagan years, may rank as a seminal work of the business culture. For one thing, it vividly established a new benchmark of riches—there were really, it turned out, a whole lot of people who had achieved mythic levels of dough. Absolute-freedom money. Start-your-own-nation stuff. For another, it was a folksy instruction manual. Anybody, apparently, with a head for business and a modicum of audacity could make a few hundred million bucks.

And then there was Malcolm himself. He was a Reagan complement. While each man represented stiff and conservative and un-emoting constituencies, they were both showmen. Hollywood was, ultimately, the point (Malcolm Forbes’s 70th-birthday party in Morocco, with Elizabeth Taylor on his arm, was a pivotal Hollywood-business-culture moment). Both men helped foster the most profound transition of our time: making business sexy, expansive, embracing, even polymorphous.

But this left Forbes, especially after polymorphous Malcolm died, as an awkward cultural fit. That it neither acquired nor was acquired; that it remained in private hands; that the company was known for a yacht instead of a G4—all of this suddenly made it seem quaint and fragile. The fact that Forbes remained an independent company was not so much an accomplishment as an eccentricity—and probably a costly one. (If the business magazine FastCompany, an unproven title with limited revenues, sold for nearly $400 million, how much would that have made Forbes worth—$2 billion or $3 billion? How could the Forbes family, if they had any head for business at all, not have taken the money and run?)

So much about the magazine seemed out of sync. The brothers, with their odd primogeniture plan (Steve, by dint of first birth, got the top title and biggest share of the business). The crotchety old editor, James W. Michaels, on the job for decades, only to finally retire and be replaced by another lifelong veteran of the magazine, William Baldwin (just a somewhat younger icon of crotchetiness). And then you had the magazine’s uplifting quotations and mini-sermons and ritualistic pomposity. And, of course, there was Steve Forbes’s loopy quest for the presidency and efforts to restore the Republican Party to its place as the party of the pants-pulled-up-too-high set.

Like all business magazines in the nineties, Forbes raked it in. But as business became the big media subject, and one of the great media revenue generators, Forbes also got roughed up by the competition.

Forbes may have remained the magazine of true believers, but Fortune and BusinessWeek (and so many other New Economy comets) became the must-reads of the yuppies and entrepreneurs and opportunists and faddists and marketers and digital schemers and reconstructed radlibs. These magazines were not fundamentally about business but about celebrity, heat, fashion. They were the new business culture. Forbes was the old.

But both old and new in the summer of 2002 were in bad shape. Fortune and BusinessWeek were certainly no fun anymore. And at Forbes, for the first time, they’d had to lay off staff, sell from the collections (those preposterous Fabergé eggs!), even ask senior execs to take pay cuts.

So, what if? What if the market didn’t soon recover? I couldn’t help wondering—my anticipation was growing. What if we continue to see corruption behind every boardroom door? What if I and other chattering sorts get to be socialists again? What if the pendulum has really swung as dramatically as that?

This was exciting: the collapse of monoliths, the end of business talk, a return to a cottage media industry (oddly, not unlike the Forbes company itself), the rise of new (old) values to complement a falling GDP (this really will be weird), and a new, widely shared antipathy for CEOs and fat cats everywhere (Cheney and Halliburton—ha!).

And it might well be, I thought, an exciting possibility for Tim Forbes (and for Steve and their brothers, Bob and Kip).

“If the world becomes more hostile to business, it just makes our job easier,” Tim said, with something like irony.

I would not say that there was, on the Forbes boat, exactly a mood of giddiness (or that the Forbeses have ever been giddy). But, possibly, something was in the air: a sense of renewed mission. Dennis Kneale, the Young Turk (at 44) who was brought in from the Wall Street Journal a few years ago as managing editor to liven things up, was energetically announcing a “Free Martha” campaign. There was a not unhappy sense of this being time to circle the wagons, of capitalism having to be defended once more from the hoi polloi.

“I do believe we do things right in this country,” Tim remarked, with, for him, a fair degree of passion.

It will, of course, not be the business culture that Forbes is defending but, rather, business itself. The Forbeses, too, may well take some pleasure in the collapse of monoliths, the end of business talk as a popular pastime (business talk, business secrets, should be the province of businessmen), and an affirmation of their own, standalone business model.

It occurs to me that while subscribing to the Forbes attitude might not have made businessmen more ethical, it would certainly have been wise on everyone’s part to play it, Forbes-style, a little more conservatively. Businessmen get into trouble not just because of accounting tricks but because they think they’re something more than faceless businessmen—whereas at Forbes, a businessman plays it close to the vest.

Yes. The arrivistes and wannabes screwed things up, but now the natural order may be righted.

On the yacht, you’ll have the true believers in capitalism (in their madras jackets), and on dry land, everyone else—hurling insults at them.

I began an email to Heilemann and Battelle on how this conference could be the first postbusiness conference. That that should be the subject here: What replaces business? What is the new energizing, organizing force?

What would all the ambitious guys do now?

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BOB PITTMAN— A DIGRESSION (#ulink_ca66fdf1-01d4-5774-9655-b9cf039dde7e)

I Was sorry there’d be no Bob Pittman at the conference. He had become—at least for a moment—one of the media business’ most significant entities.

This has to do with a certain cult of personality—he has a kind of suaveness which makes everybody else feel so small-time—but it also had to do with function. There was, everywhere, this sense of corporate limitations. As corporations got bigger and bigger, as indeed they all recommitted themselves to getting bigger and bigger still, there came the simultaneous understanding that bigness was paralyzing too. While you might be unassailable, you were also immovable.

Pittman was wily and foxy and came to be thought of as the person who could move the modern corporation. This wasn’t just because he was a smart manager or a brilliant salesperson (and he was the latter), but because he was rumored to have the touch.

To understand, in a way other managers did not, pop culture.

Certainly, he had the bona fides.

He was attended by the magic of being from out of town. He was a heartlander—not a medialand dweller. This implied a kind of oneness with the great rolling public out there. Indeed, he had an actor’s look—and what is an actor, if not a sculpted every-man?

He was almost Elvis-like. He came from the South and had come out of radio. There was no more basic American media than radio: teenagers and ad space.

Plus he had social abilities. More important even, he had media abilities. Great press surrounded him.

Social abilities, of course, were not necessarily distinct from media abilities (arguably, media abilities had become social abilities): Pittman and his wife would live for a period on Central Park West across the hall from Steve Shepard, who would become the editor of BusinessWeek. Shepard would come to conclude that Pittman was an exemplary manager and grant him favorable coverage for years to come, including the crowning cover story in BusinessWeek after the AOL Time Warner merger was completed.

And then, most of all, there was MTV.

Pittman either single-handedly invented the notion of a cable channel that would air (at no cost to itself) the promotional videos which had become popular for music acts, or he did not.

This has become like the scholarly wrangle that surrounds certain not-precisely-authenticated works of art. The dispute does not so much discredit Pittman as put him at the exact center, even if its details are disputed, of the most brilliant media development in postmodern memory.

After MTV was bought and Pittman exited, he founded the kind of enterprise that would become popular later: a no-company company, or a no-function company. Its product was Bob Pittman. We have Bob Pittman and you come to us with opportunities for Bob Pittman. It was like a Mafia thing. People lined up outside the door of Bob Pittman’s Quantum Media and were granted audiences with Pittman and, if he agreed to cooperate, then various terms were discussed wherein Bob Pittman lent you his approval.

You were then in business with Bob Pittman—or with Bob Pittman’s cachet.

Pittman’s model, his rabbi, his godfather, was Warner Communications’ Steve Ross. Pittman was to be the next-gen Ross, an entertainment executive with charisma (that is, salesmanship) and vision (that is, a sense of the next step, the next move, the audacious opportunity).

After MTV, and his brief, independent career, Ross brought him back into Warner, where he came to run the theme parks, and where, in a more controllable world, he might have succeeded Ross. The merger of Time and Warner in 1990 complicated that (the fight between the Ivy League-ish Time side and the unreconstructed Warner side would still be a company theme until the AOL merger) but made it a bigger prize—which Pittman might still have gotten, had not Ross died, of prostate cancer, in 1992.

With Ross gone, Pittman was a homeless gun.

He became the CEO of Century 21, the national real estate firm, intending, perhaps, to show that he was a manager for all seasons—all products, all services, all functions. (This is really a manager’s holy grail, to be able to manage anything at all.) But really, he had a country club air of underemployment.

Indeed, going to AOL in 1996 did not seem really any more directed than going into the residential real estate business—it was just Pittman casting about.

And yet suddenly, almost within weeks of his arrival, Pittman turned on the gas that would inflate and then explode the Internet bubble.

He took AOL from an hourly charge to a fixed-fee basis (i.e., from three-something an hour to $19.95 and all you can eat a month). This became the most significant engine of Internet growth. Instead of being on the meter, America was suddenly on an unlimited ride.

The fact that what was created here was largely an illusion—that the company had gone from a proven, profitable pay-as-you-use scheme to an unproven new vision of infinite more-customers-more-advertising-and-direct-selling scalability—was, as yet, unrecognized.