Bloodsport
When Ruthless Dealmakers, Shrewd Ideologues, and Brawling Lawyers Toppled the Corporate Establishment
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
The epic battle of the fascinating, flawed figures behind America's deal culture and their fight over who controls and who benefits from the immense wealth of American corporations.
Bloodsport is the story of how the mania for corporate deals and mergers all began. The riveting tale of how power lawyers Joe Flom and Marty Lipton, major Wall Street players Felix Rohatyn and Bruce Wasserstein, prominent jurists, and shrewd ideologues in academic garb provided the intellectual firepower, creativity, and energy that drove the corporate elite into a less cozy, Hobbesian world.
With total dollar volume in the trillions, the zeal for the deal continues unabated to this day. Underpinning this explosion in mergers and acquisitions -- including hostile takeovers -- are four questions that radically disrupted corporate ownership in the 1970s, whose force remains undiminished:
Are shareholders the sole "owners" of corporations and the legitimate source of power?
Should control be exercised by autonomous CEOs or is their assumption of power illegitimate and inefficient?
Is the primary purpose of the corporation to generate jobs and create prosperity for the masses and the nation?
Or is it simply to maximize the wealth of shareholders?
This battle of ideas became the "bloodsport" of American business. It set in motion the deal-making culture that led to the financialization of the economy and it is the backstory to ongoing debates over competitiveness, job losses, inequality, stratospheric executive pay, and who "owns" America's corporations.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Warren Zevon's call to "send lawyers, guns, and money" could be Teitelman's anthem for the mergers and acquisitions heyday of the mid-1970s and '80s. Corporate raiders, armed with junk bonds, attorneys, and sheer brio, targeted corporate giants and felled them. It's a great story, with profound implications for the way America views and regulates corporations. Teitelman shows that corporations were not always regarded as the sole property of shareholders. As recently as the 1960s, courts (and the overall culture) regarded corporations as having multiple stakeholders: management, employees, suppliers, and customers. This view was steadily eroded during takeover battles, as maximizing shareholder value became management's principal responsibility. Teitelman chronicles this history exhaustively, showing how contemporary social issues, such as the disparity in pay between CEOs and workers and Wall Street's responsibilities to Main Street, hearken back to this era. Teitelman has a masterly command of his subject, yet he sometimes sacrifices clarity in favor of a jocular, hyperbolic writing style more akin to Rolling Stone than the New Yorker. But this is a minor flaw in this comprehensive look at corporate takeovers.
