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Remembering Jerry Levin, The Thoughtful Visionary Who Flubbed His Biggest Deal And Cut A Different Figure Than Brash Media Rivals
Gerald Levin, who ran Time Warner and engineered its ill-fated merger with AOL, leaves a complicated legacy. He died this week at the age of 84.
Jeff Bewkes took the helm after Parsons, and formally unwound the merger in 2009, leading to the classic picture of workers removing the ‘AOL’ letters from atop New York’s Time Warner Center. AOL-Time Warner happened at around the same time that Sumner Redstone merged CBS and Viacom, and Universal Studios parent Seagram sold itself to French conglomerate Vivendi, and both of those combinations would also soon unravel. After cable pioneer Charles Dolan hit on the initial idea as a solution to his New York company’s issues with delivering clear TV signals through the concrete canyons of Manhattan, Levin refined it.
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