 Okay to Change Your Mind 213 40 percent since the beginning of the year, made matters even more tenuous. With assets of $200 billion and a market cap of only $118 billion, AT&T could be a takeover target. The media and professional investors, who had hailed Armstrong just months before, began to turn on him. Business Week, which had praised him at the beginning of 1999 for "surprise-keeping his promises to investors," in mid- 2000 warned that "the jig is up for AT&T" and crowed, "AT&T can't buy its way out of this mess." When rumors spread that Armstrong was on his way out, to be replaced by John Malone, the company's stock price actually went up. That was not one of Armstrong's favorite days. Malone Tries to Help In July 2000, with the stock at an all-time low, Malone thought he could help. When Leslie Cauley of the Wall Street Journal made one of her periodic calls "trolling for story ideas," as she put it, Malone agreed to speak on the record. No one would have been surprised if Malone had been upset with AT&T's management. Thanks to the stock's slide, he had lost about $1 billion on paper. He had made no secret of the fact that he thought Somers had allowed too much short- term debt to accumulate and then compounded the error by disposing of assets in transactions with high tax costs. He had also been disap- pointed when Armstrong decided that he didn't need the complica- tions of tracking stocks, as originally contemplated in the TCI acquisition. But Malone, who had built his career on rocking the boat, had decided to go along. He had voted with the other directors on every one of the company's major acquisitions and strategic moves. And he wanted to send a clear signal that he supported Armstrong and had no desire to take over. In fact, right after hanging up with Cauley, he called Armstrong and told him what he had done. Armstrong told me to expect a story in the next day's Journal that would set the record straight on Malone's support. When Cauley called for comment on a story that had obviously already 