NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker may be out to lunch, but he’s not talking — though others are.
Zucker is scheduled to speak at the UBS Global Media conference on Dec. 8. We don’t know if he’ll have much insight into NBCU’s future under new Comcast leaders, but we can debunk some Hollywood gossip about his own future.
According to our snitches, there’s a rumor making the rounds that Zucker is joining Time Warner’s CNN.
Zucker’s certainly expressed an interest in returning to journalistic roots in some form, but our insiders say there’s nothing to it. The rumor was fueled by a simple lunch that Zucker had with Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes at Michael’s in New York.
The lunch — held shortly before both Zucker and CNN US chief Jonathan Klein were fired — was not about securing a new post, say executives familiar with the conversation.
Talks were about loosening NBC’s grip on Piers Morgan, who’s already at CNN. Morgan needed wiggle room in his “America’s Got Talent” contract in order to take up the new post.
Morgan is scheduled to replace Larry King in January.
The guessing game about Zucker’s next move continues. –Claire Atkinson
Curve ball
Yankees fans take heart. The Texas Rangers may not have the financial firepower to outbid the Bronx Bombers for standout lefty Cliff Lee.
There are whispers in some baseball pre cincts that because of the Rangers’ limited revenue streams and that the team just emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization, the orga nization doesn’t have the cash or cash flow — perhaps as much as $20 mil lion a season — to afford Lee.
Unless, that is, the secretive new bil lionaire owners of the team, energy magnate Ray Davis, who bought many of bankrupt Enron’s pipeline assets, and Bob Simpson, who sold his energy com pany XTO to Exxon in June, decide to dig into their own pockets and invest more in the team.
The duo bought the team by putting up roughly $200 million and borrowing $180 million from a Bank of America- led lending group expecting to make a 10 percent-plus annual rate of return over perhaps a five-year period before exit ing their positions, said a source.
Davis and Simpson found the Rang ers attractive because they were sell ing for a low-ball price considering they play in the biggest media market with a single team. The two also thought the money- losing Rangers had talented players making low salaries.
“They look at this from a business standpoint,” the source close to the owner ship group said. The Rang ers in 2010 had only a $55 mil lion payroll, one of the lowest in the league. Raising Lee’s salary from $9 million to roughly $20 million a year would mean a 20 percent hike.
Davis and Simpson also need to consider that besides Lee, who is testing the free-agency waters, AL MVP Josh Hamilton can declare himself eligible after the 2012 season.
Rangers sources counter that Fox (part of NewsCorp like The Post), which recently reached a new broadcast deal with the team, gave them enough up-front money (roughly $80 million) to cover the Lee signing. —Josh Kosman
Tech pay
Silicon Valley’s big-three tech tycoons are still in a race to see who’ll get the biggest billion-dollar-plus payday this year from selling their insider shares.
The race is down to the wire with just the final four trading weeks of the year left.
Filings show that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft and Larry Ellison of Oracle are the nation’s top three sellers of their personal stakes in their respective companies, year to date.
The Nasdaq is up by 12 percent thus far, nearly double the returns of the Dow Jones industrial average and the Standard & Poor’s 500. Oracle is up 12 percent, while Microsoft is down 17 percent.
Ballmer landed most of his gains from a single sale earlier this month to unload 60 million founders’ shares he’d held since 1981.
Offloading the founders’ shares gave him a $1.61 billion payday. His additional sales this month boosted the total take to $2.28 billion thus far. He still owns another 333.2 million shares valued at $8.4 billion.
Gates trailed at $2.13 billion from his steady stream of insider sales in 2011. The philanthropist has topped the list of insider stock sellers for years and also has topped Forbes’ richest Americans list for more than a decade.
Gates still owns about twice as many shares as Ballmer, valued at $15.4 billion.
Not be outdone, Oracle’s chief Ellison dumped a steady stream of 1 million shares for the past two weeks to pocket a quick $280.5 million in the period — boosting his gain on stock sales year-to-date to $1.41 billion. He still owns another 1.1 billion shares of Oracle, valued at $30.4 billion. —Paul Tharp