Master Of The Universe

In 1994, he left Lazard to join the Compagnie Générale des Eaux, a water and waste-service group founded by Napoleon III in 1853, and became its CEO just 19 months later. He immediately set out to pull apart the firm's gangling structure and sell off more than $25 billion in holdings. "When he got here, it was really l'horreur!" recalls an associate from those early days. "A lot of the older executives couldn't believe that [then chairman] Guy Dejouany brought in this guy who could have been his grandson as his successor. In the end, he only had to maneuver a few people out of the executive circle to convince everyone that he was, indeed, the boss, and things began falling into place after that." Jean-Marc Espalioux, the company's former financial director, recalls that Messier "took power like Napoleon on the 18th Brumaire — it was a coup d'état."

In what would become his signature sell-to-buy style, Messier pooled the divestment proceeds with the group's lucrative water revenues to finance a spate of deals that created one of Europe's largest media units. In 1998, with the group activities narrowed to communications and the world's largest water-waste business, Compagnie Générale des Eaux became Vivendi.

"Our vision since the start was to marry content and delivery, and use technology to create wider, faster and more flexible points of access to information and entertainment," Messier said during a two-hour interview in his elegant, wood-paneled Paris office overlooking the Arc de Triomphe. But his early efforts to produce a European titan by allying Canal Plus — a major film producer and satellite owner, as well as Europe's largest pay TV company — with industrial partners repeatedly stalled.

Meanwhile, Messier took advantage of deregulation by setting up Cegetel, France's second-largest fixed and mobile phone operator, whose investor group also includes Britain's Vodafone. As Messier strengthened his publishing hand on one side — buying U.S. gamesmaker Cendant Software and merging it with his Havas publishing — he added Internet to the mix by taking control of AOL's French operation (sold off following the AOL-Time Warner merger). Less than four years after taking command, Messier had started to put together the content-and-conduit structure he saw as the winning combination of the future.

But if Messier thought he had a copyright on that idea, the January 2000 announcement of AOL's acquisition of Time Warner came as a jolt. The union created a communications mammoth with combined revenues that are likely to approach $40 billion this year, a delivery infrastructure based on Time Warner's gigantic U.S. cable network and AOL's ability to reach into the homes of its 33 million Internet subscribers worldwide. The new group planned on using those digital tubes to sell the news and entertainment content of the Time Inc. magazine group and the music, film and TV library of the Warner group. Of the AOL Time Warner deal Messier said, "Nothing would ever be the same for Vivendi."

Rather than leading the charge into the future, Messier was now forced to play catch-up — and fast. He renewed earlier contacts with Seagram CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr., whose Universal entertainment affiliate had plenty of content but nothing to deliver it with. In just six months, the two men struck an agreement for Vivendi to buy the entire Seagram group, merge Universal's music and film units with Vivendi's communications activities and sell off Seagram's drinks business. "This was a very good fit," says Messier. "It also created a group with a lot of firsts: on the Universal side, the global leader in music, and one of the world's largest studios. On the Vivendi side, you have European cinema production, the largest European pay-TV channel digital-satellite platform. On the studio side alone — between Studio Canal and Universal — you have a resource that won eight Oscars [for films like Gladiator, with DreamWorks, and Erin Brockovich, with Columbia] and five Palmes d'Or at Cannes." And a team that already has 2001 box office winners, The Mummy Returns and Jurassic Park III, and American Pie 2 as a coming attraction.

Though he is clearly pleased with such results, Messier is not a man given to boasting. His manner is low-key, his speech conversational, hands waving in the air to underscore his points. His tailoring, always impeccable, tends toward the casual. His hazel eyes study interlocutors with no trace of aggressiveness or intimidation. "He really hears people out," says Agnès Touraine, vice president of Vivendi Universal Publishing and an executive committee member. "That said, he'll really insist on making his thinking understood — try to convince the person his way is the right way."

Messier's personal tastes are simple for a corporate titan — no yachts, stables or golf clubs, though he does have access to a company Airbus when he needs it. Weekends at his home in Rambouillet, 50 km southwest of Paris, center around the family — wife Antoinette and five children ranging in age from five to 16. His favorite sports are tennis, cycling and skiing. He enjoys cooking, with encouragement from superchef Alain Ducasse, a friend and culinary mentor. He keeps an eclectic collection of CDs ranging from opera to jazz and plays them virtually nonstop in his Paris office. His cultural interests led him to launch a website last April — Divento.com — with descriptions of 15,000 cultural events in 18 European cities. Yet he says, "The day you see me reading a script you should begin to worry — that's not my job."

There's a tough side too. "The man has the face of a happy adolescent or perhaps a well-fed monk. He looks serene, jolly, insouciant — not at all like a killer," says someone who has dealt with Messier over the years. "But the man will take out a rival in the blink of an eye." Espalioux concurs: "His method is to obtain capitulation face to face. He never raises his voice but when he speaks softly, he can be lethal."