Time Warner deal is peak of ambitious climb for AT&T chief

New York

RANDALL Stephenson, the chief executive of AT&T, could easily be pigeonholed as just another empire-building executive with a white-bread résumé. He is a 56-year-old Republican from Oklahoma atop a 140-year-old company, whose extracurricular highlights include serving as president of the Boy Scouts of America and shaping professional golf as a policy board member for the PGA Tour.

But Mr Stephenson is staking out risky business propositions - and not only his US$85.4 billion offer to buy Time Warner, a megadeal that would create the world's largest media company, with enormous operations in both content and distribution.

Since the federal government broke up AT&T more than three decades ago, the company has been deliberately reassembling itself as a media powerhouse. Over the last 15 years, AT&T has struck more than US$200 billion of deals. Mr Stephenson was involved in them al…