In fact, I think the old sobriquet, “corporate raiders”, was more accurate. The telecoms group, which orchestrated a controversial and ill-advised merger with Time Warner last year, is an underperforming, mismanaged dodo bird of a company — big enough to have racked up $190bn in debt yet not large enough to fend off the Big Tech apex predators ready to eat its lunch. in AT&T, says the company “not only failed to keep pace with the broader market, but has actually underperformed by over 150 percentage points” over the past decade.