AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson: Can a Phone Guy Click with Entertainment?

Randall Stephenson, by most accounts, is not a loudmouth. But the chief executive of AT&T is making serious noise in the entertainment business.

The 6-foot-4-inch Stephenson, an accountant by training, is looming large with his $85 billion bid for Time Warner — sealed, seemingly, at lightning speed. It’s a deal that will likely be the biggest wager of his career and will saddle AT&T with a sizable chunk of new debt, not to mention a circus of regulatory hoops through which to jump. This is not a job for some faint-of-heart bean counter.

Over the past five years, Stephenson, 56, has overseen the telco’s investment of more than $140 billion in wireless and wireline networks and spectrum acquisitions. Last year, he closed the $49 billion deal for DirecTV to make AT&T the No. 1 pay-TV provider in the U.S. Now, with Time Warner, Stephenson wants to complete the equation by taking content from Warner Bros., HBO, TBS, TNT, CNN, and other networks, and feed them in new ways to AT&T’s 100 million-plus mobile, TV, and broadband customers.

“The consumer is about one thing: video,” he said last month at an investor conference. “And we’re seeing them consume more video than they have ever consumed … across multiple platforms and multiple devices.”

Oklahoma born-and-raised, Stephenson has been CEO of AT&T since 2007. But he has worked for some incarnation of Ma Bell or its spinoffs his entire career. He began in 1982 at Southwestern Bell Telephone and climbed the ladder to become COO by the time his boss, then-SBC CEO Ed Whitacre, bought AT&T in 2005 in a $16 billion deal.

The “new” AT&T brings many of the Baby Bells back together, but the company that Stephenson runs today is almost nothing like the landline dial-tone providers of three decades ago.

And the head honcho has concluded that AT&T cannot live on pipes alone. “Premium content always wins,” he said in announcing the Time Warner pact. “It has been true on the big screen, the TV screen, and now it’s proving true on the mobile screen.”

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