oberts two days later to give him the board's conditions, Roberts said, "You've really ruined my weekend. I'll call you back later." Reenter Comcast No one called until the July Fourth weekend. On Sunday, July 8, the fax machine at Armstrong's home in Connecticut spit out a letter from Ralph and Brian Roberts; at about the same time, the letter appeared on the fax machines of newspapers around the country. The Robertses Tough Calls were making what is technically known as a subsidiary bear hug for AT&T Broadband. The financial terms were straightforward enough: Comcast stock worth about $44.5 billion and the assumption of $13.5 billion in debt for the core cable assets, with the value of other proper- ties, such as the company's interests in Time Warner Entertainment and Cablevision, to be negotiated separately. But the way Comcast positioned the deal was brilliant. It an- nounced the deal late on the Sunday afternoon of a holiday weekend, when most reporters-and the experts they would consult-were away from the office, helping to ensure that the first reports would be based primarily on its news release and that AT&T's response would neces- sarily be vague. Comcast had also hired the investment bankers with the most widely followed cable analysts, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, to eliminate any commentary that those analysts might other- wise make. Then it added AT&T's traditional lead banker, J. P. Mor- gan, to the list to help finance the deal. But the real punch line came the next day at an analyst meeting Comcast staged at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City. The com- pany's president, a former Disney executive named Steve Burke, laid out the most compelling reason for approving the merger: Comcast could do a better job of running the cable business. Burke compared Comcast's 4I percent margins to AT&T Broad- band's, which were running at about 18 percent. Function by function, service by service, he showed how Comcast could wring savings out of AT&T's cable systems. He even showed how Comcast had already