**$10b buys a good story **
The more advanced the civilization, the longer its lawsuits.
Getty Oil is about capitalist and legal sausage making. For capitalism, acquisitions show a system’s ability to transfer ownership of one fictional to another to reasonably allocate resources among competing projects. From a legal perspective, tying up loose ends to satisfy a myriad of stakeholders shows a system capable of working through edge cases and getting to at least the perception of procedural fairness. But every mechanism increasing specialization and complexity introduces risk. Eventually something blows up.
The taking of Getty Oil is the most spectacular such blowup, where tripartite negotiations broke down and led to a $10b settlement that completely destroyed the buyer. This includes the primary actors such as Mr. Getty, a wealthy scion who had more money than brains, the management team that may have executed quarterly earnings reports well, but totally missed on the financial ocean they operated in. In the end the narrative is driven by the sore loser whose emotions led him on a crusade to destroy the company he was trying to acquire. *It hasn’t exactly been pleasant over these last four years, but it was something that had to be done. * Cole shines a spotlight on the intermediary financial and legal advisors, one such firm earned $10m for 79 hours of work. Of course everybody is following their own emotions and interests more than those of the fictional entities they represent: * Years latter, what they remembered most about the pebble beach meeting was that an exceptional golfing opportunity had been wasted. *
Cole’s narrative first covers the events chronologically, then retreads through the legal case that resulted. In the first telling, you know that Cole has revealed details important to the subsequent legal case, but like the participants in the lawsuit, it wasn’t until afterwards that we understand which details matter. In the end, the most honorable players lost the most. This book is an elucidating encapsulation of how modern capitalism and the legal systems work, I learned a ton.