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Jeff Bewkes Financial Genius

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by Kevin Maney
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Sep 17 2008 9:36am EDT

Jeff Bewkes, Financial Genius

Kevin Maney scratches his head: So this morning I'm reading the comments by Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes in an interview with my Portfolio.com colleague, Lloyd Grove. Here on the tech beat, I was particularly interested in what Bewkes had to say about Time Warner's purchase of also-ran social network Bebo for a whopping $850 million early this year. (Bebo, like Jerry Lewis, is big in Europe.)


Lloyd asked: And if you had to do it all over again, would you pay $850 million for Bebo?

And Bewkes, if you cut out his dissembling, replied: "We don't know. If our plans work out, we did not overpay. But then somebody says it's compared to what you could've paid. If our plans work out less well than we thought, we would have overpaid by a few hundred million dollars."

Right. If it works out well, Time Warner didn't overpay. If it doesn't, it overpaid. As in: If the stock I bought goes up, I didn't overpay. If it goes down, I did. Now that's genius.

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