AT&T paid $85B for Time Warner — exited four years later, wrote down $24.8B

AT&T announced its purchase of Time Warner in October 2016, and the Justice Department sued to stop it. A federal judge rejected the government's case, and the deal closed on 14 June 2018: $53.75 in cash plus 1.4 AT&T shares for each Time Warner share, an acquisition worth about $85 billion. The court victory preserved the deal; what came with it was the bill.

The debt outgrew the strategy. By the end of 2021 AT&T carried nearly $180 billion of it, and the company agreed to spin off WarnerMedia into a merger with Discovery. That transaction closed in April 2022: AT&T shareholders received 71% of the combined company, and AT&T took roughly $44 billion from the deal to pay down debt. Four years after winning the right to own Time Warner, the media business was gone.

The final accounting came with the Q4 2022 results published on 25 January 2023: a $23.1 billion loss from continuing operations in the quarter, built on $26.8 billion of non-cash charges — $24.8 billion of goodwill impairments against the Business Wireline, Consumer Wireline and Mexico units, plus $1.4 billion of abandoned wireline assets. The full-year loss was $6.9 billion, and total debt still stood at $135.9 billion. WarnerMedia's results had been recast as discontinued operations: the $85 billion acquisition no longer appeared in AT&T's continuing numbers at all.