by Martyn Warwick - Time Warner’s merger with America Online (AOL) is a byword for the hubris of overweening ambition and financial disaster. It cost shareholders billions of dollars and the company came under such sustained attack by the media and the market for it’s mishandling of the partnership that Time Warner eventually dropped ‘AOL’ from its name in a belated attempt to distance itself from the fiasco.
But, as we have seen so often over recent years, debts and disapproval don’t stop the captains of US industry from surrounding themselves all the ostentatious trappings of office to which they consider themselves entitled by some sort of divine right.
Thus, Richard Parsons, Time Warner’s chairman, is about to move into a massive and palatial suite in the most expensive office-space in America.
The suite will be completed next month. Fitting it out will cost US$25 million.
It will, of course, have marble floors throughout (so necessary in those steamy New York summers don’tcha know) and will be panelled in what are described as “rare and exotic hardwoods”.
