Leveraged Buyouts, iHeartradio / Clearchannel, or both?
Both, but really fuck the shit out of Clear Channel. I mean, Ackerley was plenty bad enough. They were corporate AF. But I had friends that worked there and they didn't hate it. Clear Channel? I don't know anybody who voluntarily worked for Clear Channel. Not only that, they're the fuckers that sold the Sonics to Howard Shultz who drove them into the ground and then sold them to Oklahoma. Those fuckers were overpaying a factor of ten for radio four years after Napster. And why? Fucking Jack FM. That Clear Channel survived 2008 is a christmas goddamn miracle; I'm delighted to see their abysmal crushing failure.At the time of the closure of the transaction, the sale price was reported to be 38 times cashflow (approximately $1.1B USD) the highest ever sale valuation for a North American publicly traded media company in the history of the NYSE.
My real fear is the story nobody is talking about yet: all those assets are going to be bought by someone. And Sinclair - a truly evil organization that even tops Faux News for epic shittiness - is on a buying spree, and has oodles of cash, and a zealot's mission against liberalism, ecology, and a deep case of xenophobia. Fuck iHeartradio and ClearChannel to hell. But Sinclair IS hell. And you know they are angling to buy up a shitload of the airwaves at fire sale prices.
Ajit Pai and Ryan Zinke are the two officials (outside of Trump, obviously) who I would most love to see rotting in jail cells for the rest of their lives.