Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Let’s do it. All right. So listeners, David and I have never really done a merger before in this way, really a merger of pseudo equals and so we were talking before the show about the way that we feel we should evaluate this I think the framework that we’re going to use is the combined enterprise value like far down the road, so let’s say the 2017 combined enterprise value more than the separated enterprise value. So put it a different way, if they had stayed separate and executed and both grew in value versus if they had combined and achieved dare I say synergies and were compared against what their actual combined value is today, was it a good idea for them to combine or was it valued destructive. And David, we were sort of talking, it’s tough to know like it’s tough to really identify, they’re at $44.9 billion market cap today. They were a $19 billion company upon combining the two companies. They grew over 2x and the question is, from 2008 until today over a 10-year time horizon, would they have 2x-ed on their own? And David, what do you think? I don’t know. This is a tough one. Like going through the episode and thinking, I think we’ve been very laudatory of Blizzard certainly and the merger and we’ve talked about how sort of in our expert opinion it would have been hard for a lot of this innovation and value capture really of that innovation that they realized to happen separately for both companies. On the other hand though, this merger happened in 2008 so almost 10 years ago, and that they’ve only grown kind of 2x since then. I mean 2x on a huge base like adding $20+ billion of market cap. That's not easy to do for sure.…

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