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In June 2000, Edgar Bronfman Jr. sold Seagram Co. to French media giant Vivendi in a $34-billion deal. Young, handsome and fabulously rich, Edgar Jr. seemed finally to have silenced the detractors who for fifteen years had scorned him, calling him a naïve dilettante and "the star-struck whisky king."
As the third-generation president and CEO of a family dynasty in the booze business, Edgar Jr. had made controversial corporate decisions. In 1995, he sold Seagram's holding in the secure but boring DuPont to buy Hollywood studio MCA. In 1998, he acquired PolyGram, thereby creating the world's largest record company. In 2000, when convergence was the corporate mantra, he merged Seagram with Vivendi.
At fifteen, Edgar Jr. had been designated by his grandfather, Sam Bronfman, Seagram's legendary founder, to eventually head the business Mr. Sam had built as a bootlegger during Prohibition. For Edgar Jr., that choice turned into a curse as he agonized over Mr. Sam's prescient 1966 warning: "Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations. I'm worried about the third generation. Empires have come and gone."
In 1994 when Edgar Jr. succeeded his father, he announced: "I'm not going down in history as the one Bronfman who pissed away the family fortune." Despite all his efforts, Edgar Jr. could not avoid his destiny. The value of the Bronfman family holdings in Seagram, swapped for shares in Vivendi, fell by almost three-quarters from $8.2 billion to $2.2 billion between 2000 and 2002.
As the third-generation president and CEO of a family dynasty in the booze business, Edgar Jr. had made controversial corporate decisions. In 1995, he sold Seagram's holding in the secure but boring DuPont to buy Hollywood studio MCA. In 1998, he acquired PolyGram, thereby creating the world's largest record company. In 2000, when convergence was the corporate mantra, he merged Seagram with Vivendi.
At fifteen, Edgar Jr. had been designated by his grandfather, Sam Bronfman, Seagram's legendary founder, to eventually head the business Mr. Sam had built as a bootlegger during Prohibition. For Edgar Jr., that choice turned into a curse as he agonized over Mr. Sam's prescient 1966 warning: "Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations. I'm worried about the third generation. Empires have come and gone."
In 1994 when Edgar Jr. succeeded his father, he announced: "I'm not going down in history as the one Bronfman who pissed away the family fortune." Despite all his efforts, Edgar Jr. could not avoid his destiny. The value of the Bronfman family holdings in Seagram, swapped for shares in Vivendi, fell by almost three-quarters from $8.2 billion to $2.2 billion between 2000 and 2002.