As head of Vivendi Universal, Jean-Marie Messier was the flamboyant king of spin — and in the end he flamed out. Now Messier’s successor, Jean-René Fourtou, has a new title: the king of spinning off. In the 14 months since Fourtou took over the debt-laden French conglomerate (it has more than 6,000 individual holdings), he has been breaking down the empire piece by piece. Out went the cluster of Internet ventures that never lived up to their hype, the book and magazine publishers for which Messier overpaid, and the water utility that was once the company’s core. Even its 18th century French manse, Château de Méry-sur-Oise, about 50 km northwest of Paris, is on the block.
Last week came the blockbuster spin-off, as Fourtou woke the company from Messier’s Technicolor dream of becoming a major player in Hollywood. After an epic four-month auction among many of the world’s largest media firms, the company signed a letter of intent with General Electric to merge its U.S. movie and TV businesses with GE’s NBC. The result would be a new media giant that puts Vivendi’s assets — Universal Pictures, theme parks in California, Florida, Spain and Japan, and four U.S. cable-TV stations — together with the No. 1 U.S.
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