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Gerald Levin, then co-CEO Bob Pittman, resigned. Then the board of Vivendi Universal, a French water company that had swallowed Edgar Bronfman's Universal music and movie company, grew sick of CEO Jean-Marie Messier's overreaching ambition and fired him as well. The old guards were everywhere resurgent.

At Bertelsmann, Middelhoff had been pushing a historically conservative company in more and more new directions, many of them via more than $5 billion in acquisitions. Bertelsmann, thanks to Middelhoff the world's fifth-largest media company, was used to treating its various holdings as independent firms responsible for generating profit. Middelhoff was centralizing, planning to sell off traditional holdings, and willing to make quick gambles. And now he was pressing for the controlling Mohn family to give up more of its stake than it wanted in Bertelsmann's planned initial public stock offering. The Mohn family didn't like where he was going, and Napster was one of the most obvious problems they had: They didn't see how it could make any money.

After a six-week buildup in tensions, the Bertelsmann board dismissed Middelhoff at the end of July. His replacement was fifty-nine-year-old Gunther Thielen, a twenty-year veteran from Bertelsmann's printing arm, the company's oldest. Thielen ordered a review of the company's businesses and planned to reduce Bertelsmann's debts, focus on profitability, and withdraw from some of its Internet sales efforts.

None of that sounded good for Napster, and Konrad Hilbers quickly grew nervous. With Napster champion Middelhoff gone, that left me with Joel Klein as the most prominent and highest-ranking contact partner at Bertelsmann. Then two or three days later Joel Klein was leaving, which left me with Klaus Eierhoff, the head of the Direct Group. Then a week later, Klaus Eierhoff was leaving, Hilbers complained. As the press began predicting that Bertelsmann would no longer want anything to do with Napster, Hilbers called Eierhoff's successor and was told to wait and see.

It was still better to have a reluctant buyer than no buyer at all, which is what Hilbers and Shawn feared would be the case if the Bertelsmann deal didn't go through. Bertelsmann was contractually obligated to consummate the purchase—if what had grown to a $9 million cash outlay was approved by Delaware U.S. bankruptcy judge Peter Walsh by the

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