On the latest episode of Recode Media with Peter Kafka, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson joined Peter onstage at the NBA All-Star Tech Summit to talk about sports gambling, why 5G internet will one day replace home broadband, and AT&T’s $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner last year.
“My objective from day one was to run this acquisition different than we’ve run any other acquisition,” Stephenson said. “In a typical acquisition, we come in, we have processes, we have everything from travel/entertainment expenditure guidelines to cultural aspects. We literally just forklift that onto the target and boom, start running execution and off we go. Bam! … This one, we said, ‘That’s not the play we’re going to run here.’”
Unlike those other acquisitions that more closely align with AT&T’s telecommunications history, Stephenson said Time Warner will be run more “independently.”
“You don’t want this one polluted also by a lot of the stuff going over here,”…
