Doing the Math

Time Warner is inadvertently doing its part to stem the nation’s well-publicized slide in math skills.

Reacting to angry shareholders who panned the company’s controversial $3-billion stock rights offering, Chairman Steven J. Ross argued that anyone who “does the math” will find that “it’s an unbelievable deal.”

Shareholders, some of whom are suing the company and its executives, are upset by math showing that the stock has plunged 20% in the two weeks since the plan was disclosed.

Time Warner shareholders aren’t the only ones doing the math these days. So are prospective subscribers to Time Warner-owned magazines.

The subscription postcards the company is stuffing into its magazines (such as Time, Fortune and People) tell potential subscribers only how much the magazines cost per issue. Unlike cards in rival magazines, Time avoids sticker shock by never listing the total amount subscribers will be billed alongside the cost per issue.

“We assume that people can figure out for themselves that if it is 52 issues at $1.09, that is a little over $52,” a Time spokesman says. (Actually, doing the math shows it’s $56.68.)

. . . Doing the Math (Cont.)

Time Warner’s Ross has been taking heat since it was disclosed recently that he made a staggering $78.1 million last year. Most of it came from a $74.9-million windfall triggered by the merger between Time and Warner.

For the record, $78.1 million equals:

* 71,651,376 issues of Time, assuming that Ross gets the magazine at the yearly rate. That means 1.38 million years would pass before he gets his next renewal notice.

* Some 685,087 years of Time Warner’s HBO at $9.50 a month. (Amount does not include basic cable service).

* Roughly 10 times the amount grossed by Warner Bros.’ biggest box-office dud this year, the Dan Aykroyd comedy “Nothing but Trouble.”

Maybe the Ratings Were Off

“Nightline” host Ted Koppel last week moderated an unprecedented discussion involving the heads of the Big Three auto makers--General Motors’ Robert C. Stempel, Ford’s Harold Poling and Chrysler’s Lee A. Iacocca. Much of the program centered on complaints about trade policies that American car makers contend unfairly favor Japanese rivals.

So who were some of the advertisers on the one-hour show? Three of them were Acura, Nissan and Mitsubishi.

Briefly . . .

Everybody’s bad guy: The latest World Wrestling Federation villain is “IRS,” a briefcase-toting, suspender-wearing wrestler who claims to be a tax man named “Irwin R. Schyster” . . . Stars to Go, a Los Angeles firm once hyped for being a trailblazer in supplying video rentals through convenience stories and supermarkets, entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings . . . R. H. Macy Chairman Edward S. Finkelstein, who was pressured earlier this month into backing down from his challenge to California’s Proposition 13 law, was described by a rival retail executive in a 1985 newspaper article as “willing to take a point of view and stick with it.”