WarnerMedia

WarnerMedia, LLC, formerly Time Warner Inc., was an American multinational entertainment and mass media conglomerate. After being acquired by AT&T, the company became a wholly owned subsidiary in its last years of existence. WarnerMedia's headquarters were at 30 Hudson Yards in New York City.

The company's history stems back to Kinney National Services, which purchased the Warner Bros.-Seven Arts film studio in 1969, and later reincorporated as Warner Communications Inc. (WCI) in 1972 after divesting non-core businesses. After merging with Time Inc. on January 10, 1990, the resulting company became the world's largest media conglomerate as Time Warner Inc. Throughout the 1990s, Time Warner consolidated through acquiring Turner Broadcasting System and launching the Time Warner Cable brand. A transformative event in the company's history was its unsuccessful merger with America Online (AOL) in 2001 which led to substantial losses and numerous spinoffs. After several years of corporate downsizing, Time Inc. was spun off in 2014.

Time Warner's remaining subsidiaries were Warner Bros., Turner Broadcasting, and HBO by 2014. Despite spinning off Time Inc., the "Time Warner" name was kept until June 15, 2018, when AT&T renamed the company to WarnerMedia after closing its acquisition. AT&T reorganized WarnerMedia by consolidating its subsidiaries into five business divisions and launching HBO Max in 2020. These moves were intended to synergize WarnerMedia's content libraries with AT&T's telecom distribution, but lackluster results and enormous debt led AT&T to reverse this strategy. On May 17, 2021, AT&T and Discovery, Inc. announced a Reverse Morris Trust agreement, to spinoff WarnerMedia and have it merged to form Warner Bros. Discovery on April 8, 2022.

After the merger closed, WarnerMedia became an inactive shell corporation. As Time Warner, it was the world's largest media conglomerate for 18 years, and its highest market cap was $160 billion. In 2018, the company was ranked number 130 on the Fortune 500 list. Throughout its nearly 32-year run as a company, WarnerMedia owned a variety of large media companies (including AOL, Time Inc., TW Telecom, Time Warner Cable, AOL Time Warner Book Group, Six Flags, and Warner Music Group). These companies were either sold or spun off as independent companies.