WarnerMedia

Warner Media, LLC., founded as Time Warner Inc., was an American multinationalentertainment and media conglomerate headquartered at 30 Hudson Yards in Manhattan, New York City. After being acquired by AT&T in June 2018, WarnerMedia was reorganized as a privately-ownedsubsidiary.

The corporate predecessors to WarnerMedia are Time Inc. and Warner CommunicationsInc. (WCI). By the late 1960s, both companies began repositioning themselves as major players in cable television and mass media through multiple acquisitions, and they later underwent a stock-swap merger in March 1989, which was fully finalized on January 10, 1990. The newly established company, Time Warner, was the world’s largest media conglomerate for nearly 18 years and pursued further expansion by forming Time Warner Cable in 1992 and acquiring Turner Broadcasting System in 1996. A pivotal moment in Time Warner’s history was its landmark 2001 merger with AOL, which would end up becoming one of the worst business deals in corporate history.

Heavy losses from within AOL led Time Warner to pursue a years-long divestment strategy that culminated with Time Inc.’s spin-off in 2014. Despite spinning off Time Inc., the Time Warner name was kept until June 15, 2018, when AT&T completed its $108.7 billion acquisition of the company and renamed it to WarnerMedia. Under AT&T, a centralized approach was adopted, with the company’s subsidiaries being consolidated into five divisions and HBO Max being launched in 2020, to serve as the company's primary streaming service. These moves were intended to synergize WarnerMedia’s content libraries with AT&T’s wireless distribution, to reposition the telecom giant as a diversified entertainment giant, but lackluster results led AT&T to reverse course.

On May 17, 2021, AT&T announced that it would spin off WarnerMedia through a Reverse Morris Trust and have it merge with Discovery, Inc. to establish a new, publicly traded company. This new company, Warner Bros. Discovery, began operating on April 8, 2022, and assumed management of WarnerMedia’s assets. After the merger closed, WarnerMedia became an inactive shell corporation. In 2018, the company was ranked number 130 on the Fortune 500 list. Throughout its nearly 32-year run as a company, WarnerMedia owned a variety of large media companies (including AOL, Time Inc., TW Telecom, Time Warner Cable, AOL Time Warner Book Group, Six Flags, and Warner Music Group). These companies were either sold or spun off as independent companies.

Warner Communications and Time Warner's founder, Steve Ross, died on December 20, 1992, at the age of 65, due to complications of prostate cancer, from which he suffered in his final years. Time Warner's co-founder, Richard Munro, later died on May 9, 2024, at the age of 93.