Rumor Mill
NEAR TRUTHS: BURNT OFFERINGS
October 11, 2021
I.B. with a note on IPOs old and new.
Will Tanous, who by all accounts has proven invaluable to shepherding UMG to market, had prior experience with an IPO—under very different circumstances.
Tanous was a player in WMG’s going public during the Edgar Bronfman Jr./Thomas H. Lee era. The year was 2005, the business had been in the post-Napster doldrums for several years and iTunes had just opened. The offering put Warner’s market cap at $2.4b. In 2011, after more bleak years, Len Blavatnik shrewdly forked over a tidy $3.3b for the label group. That now looks like a rather keen investment given that WMG’s market cap at present is $23.7b.