stay independent or combine with anyone but AOL Time Warner. Vivendi's Jean-Paul Messier called to stick his toes in the water, suggesting that he was willing to make a substantial investment in order to gain access to the company's cable distribution. Armstrong even received a three-page e-mail from a dot- com in Alabama, proposing a merger and reverse spin-off of AT&T's noncable assets. By the end of July 200I, AT&T Broadband was ready to update investors on its performance and its prospects. Its presentation showed that telephony penetration was improving and would break even in nine months. High-speed data service had already reached breakeven. And the unit planned to achieve industry-average margins within three years. We arranged a Webcast of the presentation from New York on Tuesday, July 24, followed by a dinner at the Four Sea- sons for invited analysts and a similar luncheon the next day in Boston. Then Armstrong and Noski took the AT&T corporate jet out to the West Coast for a series of meetings with Disney, Microsoft, and oth- ers. As they moved between Seattle and Hollywood, both men were struck by the fact that companies in the high-tech and entertainment worlds shared a common characteristic: They had few friends but many common enemies. And preeminent among the latter was AOL Time Warner. To keep AT&T's cable systems out of its clutches, Arm- strong and Noski knew that Disney and Microsoft were making the same offers of assistance to Comcast, Cox, and who knew who else. Comcast heard about the meetings almost as soon as they were scheduled, leading some of us to wonder how serious the West Coast bidders were. Steve Rattner, one of the partners at Quadrangle Invest- ments, which was advising Comcast, had been a reporter for the New York Times earlier in his career. He still had many friends in the media. But, more significantly, he knew how a well-timed leak could tilt a story's center of gravity. What might have been reported as lively interest in AT&T Broadband became a mad coast-to-coast scrambl