What company owns AT&T?
Regarding ownership, AT&T has gone through a lot and not in a straightforward manner either. Alexander Graham Bell founded the Bell Telephone Company in the late 19th century, hence beginning the history of the original AT&T business. Bell Telephone Company was developed through various mergers and restructuring to become the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T Corporation) in the 1920s; there were additional adjustments in the next decades.
With a legal monopoly on phone services, AT&T controlled the communications industry in the United States for much of the 20th century until it split in 1984. Known sometimes as Ma Bell, the corporation had a reputation for being a creative technological and research enterprise during this monopoly. But in the 1980s, a prolonged antitrust dispute forced AT&T to divide into multiple entities; this was among the biggest and most significant break-ups to have ever happened in business.
In 1984, AT&T was divested and subsequently formed seven separate ‘baby bells’ regional telephone companies. For its part, AT&T was able to preserve ownership of its long-distance services in addition to its research, manufacturing, and other divisions. These Baby Bell companies over the subsequent decades would undergo various mergers and restructuring. Among the Baby Bells emerged the Southwest Bell Corporation which was later renamed SBC Communications in 1995.
In the 1990s and 2000s, SBC would also acquire other Baby Bell companies as well as some international telecommunication companies. SBC purchased its former parent company AT&T in 2005 and then adopted the AT&T name. AT&T Inc. has re-combined many of the elements that were in the pre-1984 AT&T monopoly.
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So in modern-day AT&T Inc. is owned by itself as a publicly traded company (NYSE: T) It is not the same AT&T company in structural and legal terms as it existed before the year 1984, but today the AT&T communication brand has reunited many of those old assets through a series of mergers, acquisitions and rebranding based on the AT&T name. Although AT&T now is a separate company, today AT&T Inc. is virtually a merger of the former core business divested by the historic monopoly AT&T company created by Alexander Graham Bell over 140 years ago, or “Ma Bell”.
To answer the direct and brief question – What company owns AT&T? – the answer would be AT&T owns itself. It is publicly traded is a part of the S&P 500 index, and has the trading symbol T in the stock market. The current AT&T company can be said to be a reincarnation of many of the assets that were spun off from the original historic AT&T monopoly or so-called “Ma Bell” after the divestiture that took place in the year 1984. By making acquisitions and mergers in the last few decades, AT&T has integrated many of the primary telecommunications service elements and dominant Bell system brands that can be traced back to Alexander Graham Bell’s Bell Telephone Company in the late 1800s.
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