Mario Gabelli, CEO and chairman of Gabelli Funds, said that now is the time to buy CBS following reports Les Moonves is out as the company’s CEO and chairman.
H/T Dataroma
Mario Gabelli: ‘Pick Up The Phone’ And Buy CBS
Q2 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc
Transcript
I am recommending that you pick up the phone and call your broker and buy CBS. Today the stock is 54 I Anello is going to inherit a strategy that was well placed. He's going to continue to execute well. And then you know there's an old rule rule that we all learned in the second grade and that is if she has the gold she rules so you've got to give credit to Sherry she pulled it off. And so at the moment she gets a new board. She has total flexibility with regards to what you want to do but let's count money OK.
CBS National Amusement owns 30 million shares of CBS of the voting stock. She owns nine million they own nine billion shares of the lower voting non-voting. So they have 40 million shares approximately. So if they can get 80 dollars 80 dollars times four million shares is three point two billion. It's not nothing but when you pay it you tax. Why would you want to sell the company. So from my point of view I'm trying to figure out what Sherry is doing next. You've got two guys from Columbia Business School Bakhsh running Viacom and you've got Anello running CBS. They have a good. So where does the world want to buy this. They want content. So if I were Paramatta what I would do if I were Shehri I'd start taking my Japanese lessons and talk to the guys that are running Sony. And I think they're ready to do something so put together Columbia Pictures and get more content on scale particularly if Fox and Disney can get together you can merge some studios this makes a lot of sense.
Hey Matt it's Josh Brown so hey josh how are you. I'm doing great. Good to hear from you on this topic. So following that thread let's talk about whether or not CBS and Viacom would actually be the more obvious thing to have to have a look.
The answer is that she can't propose the answer is you know I've watched Rich Parsons who does a great job. Has that been fantastic over the last 20 30 years that I've known him. And you know the notion of common sense at some point in time you'll say hey look. Let's put the two together.
If they come together though is that so much my feeling on Viacom specifically and maybe CBS a little bit is that they do have good content. That's not the best but a lot of it. But they don't have distribution for the 21st century mash these two together. Don't you just get like a bigger Lionsgate or bigger. AMC Networks and not necessarily an answer to the real problem which is direct to consumer.
I agree. You only have four and a half million subscribers and the answer is Netflix has a 130 million.
And so as a result Disney will be better.
So you know how do I accelerate that and that's work in progress. OK. I don't think you look a great movie this year was for Paramount was mission impossible. I don't think the notion is as mission impossible as as you're describing it. But on the other side it's a long way to go to catch up and direct to the consumers. The Holy Grail you bypass the distributors not that you want to do that but you're 100 percent right.
