CASH COW CEOs

Cable World, June 26, 2000 by K.C. Neel

But MediaOne's shareholders can't be disappointed in the company's performance on Wall Street. Although MediaOne's shares have dropped like other sector stocks recently, they're still up substantially over a three-year period.

"Lillis gets beaten up by the trade press a lot because he was never part of the cable fraternity," Greenberg of Invesco says. "But he's made his investors a lot of money. He got a good price for the company when he sold it to AT&T, and, in hindsight, he ran the company well."

Ralph Roberts The former haberdasher built Comcast from the bottom up, buying his first cable system in the 1960s in Tupelo, Miss. Together with partners Julian Brodsky and Dan Aaron, they built Comcast using Brodsky's acumen as a financier and Aaron's eye for detail. As Brodsky said later: "I had my foot on the gas, Dan had his on the brake and Ralph had his hands firmly on the steering wheel."

Roberts remains a powerful force at Comcast, but son Brian runs the day-to-day business as president.

"There is a strong correlation between shareholder wealth and compensation at companies that were built from scratch (like Comcast)," says Gabelli Funds' Gabelli. And that's not a bad thing, he adds. "They've been building shareholder value for years."

Barry Diller. Diller has come a long way from his days as a mailroom clerk at the William Morris Co. Indeed, Diller has done just about everything in the media business. He was in charge of programming for ABC; worked at Paramount Pictures; built Fox Broadcasting for Rupert Murdoch from scratch; run and been run out of QVC; and finally built up USA Networks into a TV production and distribution powerhouse.

Since taking over USA three years ago, he has made several acquisitions that have expanded the company's e-commerce business, TV production and distribution outlets. USA recently purchased Trio and Newsworld International (NWI) for $100 million. He plans to spend "hundreds of millions" of dollars to program and market the two digital networks.

Some insiders expect him to have difficulty in distributing the nets, which could hurt earnings down the road. And USA's stock doesn't need any more reason to languish. The company's stock traded at $13 in 1998 and hasn't done much traveling since. USA's stock closed June 8 at $19.56 a share.

Mel Karmazin. It's going to be up to Karmazin to run the day-to-operations of the merged CBS-Viacom, and investors aren't too worried that he'll misstep. Employees, however, have their apprehensions about Karmazin, who is not exactly known as the touchy-feely type.

"He'd probably not be an easy guy to work for," Invesco's Greenberg says. "But I am happy to have him in that position. He's made a lot of money for his investors in the past, and I imagine he'll continue to do that with Viacom."

Karmazin built Infinity Broadcasting into a portfolio of more than 160 radio stations and syndicated the controversial and highly popular Howard Stern Show. He joined CBS in 1997 when Westinghouse/CBS merged with Infinity.