 the real cause: "Right now," Malone told Broadcasting and Cable magazine in early July, "if you're an AT&T shareholder, you're sitting there saying, 'Holy cow, I'm giving up 21 percent dilution on stock to get a company (TCI) with no earnings and to pick up a huge amount of goodwill amortization.' So the impact on AT&T's earnings, the way you would think this thing works, is seri- ous."I But the problem, in Malone's view, was temporary. The theory behind the tracking stock structure of the TCI deal was to insulate AT&T's traditional shareowners, who considered it essen- tially a utility stock, from the volatility of the cable business, which was still in its early investment phase and not generating earnings. Unfortunately, even the most sophisticated investors had difficulty getting their minds around the concept of a tracking stock. It was certainly beyond the ken of the widows and orphans who were thought to hold AT&T's stock. And frankly, even the institutions that had large positions in AT&T did not know what to make of it. We had not an- nounced how much of the tracking stock AT&T would hold in its own account, except to say that the public would hold a "significant por- Don't Let Plugging Leaks Become an Obsession tion." (At this stage, General Motors owned more than a third of the economic interest in Hughes Electronics.) Hindery tried to step into this vacuum by telling the Los Angeles Times that he expected AT&T to retain "little or no economic interest"II in the tracker, only to be promptly contradicted by a company spokes- person, further contributing to investor confusion. In retrospect, many of these twists and turns might have been avoided if the an- nouncement of the merger had not been rushed out before all the details had been worked out. Nothing that was known was withheld, but not everything was known. That's one of the downsides of work- ing in an environment of leaks and rumors. In the absence of more detailed information on the capital struc- ture of the tracking stock, investors moved in 