enotalone Home  |  Forum  |  Search    
The Man Who Tried to Buy the World
Jean-Marie Messier and Vivendi Universal
by Martine Orange, Jo Johnson
List Price: 25.95


Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover (November 10 2003)
Costumer Rating: Costumer rating

Read an Excerpt

The extraordinary rise and fall of Jean-Marie Messier
The first raids came at dawn in the weeks leading up to Christmas. On Thursday, December 12, 2002, fifteen police officers from the fraud squad swooped down on the headquarters of Vivendi Universal to seize computer files, documents, and e-mails.

The rise and fall of Jean-Marie Messier, Part 2
During his rapid ascent, Messier came to symbolize a new generation of French businessmen that had become culturally more attuned to American entrepreneurialism than to the state capitalism of the Old Continent.

Chapter 1: A Perfect Frenchman
On the sweltering summer night of July 3, 2001, the limousines of the cream of the French banking, business, and political worlds drew up outside the Centre Pompidou, the modern art complex in the heart of Paris.



Book Description

Jean-Marie Messier has been called the most ambitious French empire builder since Napoleon. He started as a bureaucrat at a sleepy French water utility, but he dreamed of being a global media mogul like Rupert Murdoch. And like Napoleon, he shocked the world with his accomplishments-until his inevitable downfall.

In just six years, through guile, luck, and clever accounting, Messier managed to gobble up media assets as diverse as MCA Records, Universal Studios, USA Networks, and various publishers, theme parks, videogame producers, and Internet companies on both sides of the Atlantic. He turned Vivendi Universal into a serious challenger to AOL Time Warner, News Corp., Viacom, and Disney. And in the process, he became a poster boy for the new economy, and one of the few European CEOs to act like a swaggering American.

But in 2002, everything fell apart. In The Man Who Tried to Buy the World, Jo Johnson and Martine Orange-the reporters who blew the lid off the story and often clashed with Messier-offer a page-turning narrative of the arrogant CEO's demise. The book details Messier's incredible hubris, which led him to buy more assets than he could possibly manage, while drowning his company in debt. It describes the dramatic boardroom coup that forced Messier out and explores Messier's fascinating relationships with two prominent Americans who became his partners-Edgar Bronfman, Jr., and Barry Diller.