Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…It wasn't quite the case of minnows swallowing the whale. They were closer in size than the Cap Cities/ABC deal. But definitely, InterNorth was the bigger company, but it was clear that Lay and the HNG guys were going to be running the show from then on. I think Bethany McLean puts it in this way, where it's almost like InterNorth got hoodwinked, where they knew they were paying a lot, but they knew it was important to get. But then once they started looking at the deal for a couple of months in retrospect, they were like, wait a minute, we gave HNG a lot of board seats, and their executives are having a lot of influence on the combined company. Wait a minute, we just gave away the company. Yes. Specifically, this culture clash manifests in the question of where the headquarters for this new company is going to be. The old InterNorth management team and board members, of course, want to keep the company in Omaha, and all the board members are politically connected in Omaha. They're like, we don’t want this company moving to the big city of Houston taking all these jobs out of Omaha. It's important that the company stays here. Lay, of course, he's very political. He's very diplomatic. He's willing to say the right things to appease the board, but he has no interest in moving to Omaha. He's in the big city in Houston. He's a player in the industry. He's now a Texas oilman. He wants to stay in Houston.…

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