The Keys to the Kingdom Read Online Free

buying $1 million worth of the company’s stock even as the price dropped. In September, Disney unveiled the redesign but the portal’s fortunes did not improve. At year’s end, the company’s Internet group reported a loss of $249.4 million. Finally, Disney threw in the towel.
    With the decision to fold Go. com, Disney took $790 million in noncash write offs and said it would incur as much as $50 million in expenses associated with closing the portal. Eisner said the company would focus on Web sites with powerful brands, such as ESPN.com and ABC.com, rather than trying to build a portal. “We were waiting for something at the end of the rainbow that was looking less and less worth waiting for,” he said.
    With other companies like AOL Time Warner, Viacom, and Vivendi Universal on the playing field, some industry observers began to question the wisdom of Eisner’s long-standing conservatism. To cite just one example, Disney had passed up a chance to buy Yahoo a few years earlier, when it was valued at $8 billion, because Eisner insisted on being given a discount to the market price. By 2001, Yahoo was valued at about $25 billion, while Eisner had pursued a fruitless strategy trying to home-grow an Internet unit.
    And there were other areas in which Disney had decided against expansion through acquisitions. “Disney has to recognize that it’s becoming a niche player,” analyst Christopher Dixon told the Los Angeles Times .
    Eisner answered his critics in the company’s annual report. “Companies often pay too much for other companies in search of a headline in the Wall Street Journal or because they are afraid to let cash burn a hole in their pockets,” he said. “We didn’t want to fall into this trap.” Eisner also made it clear that expansion might not be worth pursuing if it were to be achieved the way Time Warner had done it when it had agreed to be acquired by the far smaller America Online for what seemed like rather overvalued stock. And as the new behemoths like AOL Time Warner and Vivendi Universal struggled to merge their cultures, it remained to be seen whether Eisner would stay on the sidelines and if so, whether that would turn out to have been the wiser course.
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    The Door Did Not Stop Revolving at Disney
    Joe Roth quickly assembled significant financing for Revolution Studios, one of the few truly powerful independent companies to be founded in a time when money was becoming increasingly hard to find in the entertainment business. Eisner had predicted that he would vanish off the Hollywood radar as soon as he left Disney. It was with no small satisfaction, therefore, that Roth announced in February 2000 that the world’s biggest female star, Julia Roberts, was abandoning an expiring deal with Disney to follow him to his new company. “Basically, wherever Joe goes, I go,” Roberts declared. Not only did she sign a multiyear deal with Roth, she asked him to direct her in a film. While Roth stepped behind the camera to direct America’s Sweethearts , speculation continued that he would eventually become chairman of Sony’s film studio. Roth also made a deal with Bruce Willis, who had starred in Disney’s megahit The Sixth Sense .
    Patrick Naughton, the Internet executive who was downloading images of child pornography on his computer and who arranged a rendezvous with an FBI agent masquerading as a thirteen-year-old girl, was convicted in March 2000 of crossing state lines to have sex with a minor. In an extraordinary arrangement with prosecutors, he escaped serving jail time because he developed several computer programs to help the FBI track down other sex offenders prowling the Internet. He was sentenced to nine months of home detention, five years of probation, and a $20,000 fine. He continued to deny that he was a sexual predator, but said, “[The] evidene being what it was, this is where we ended up.”
    Judson