Thursday, May 28, 2009

You've Got Screwed!

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Posted By on Thu, May 28, 2009 at 9:00 AM

My nomination for worst media deal of all time: Time Warner buys AOL for $124 billion in 2000. Wasn't the tech bubble a fun time?

From Bloomberg today:

Time Warner Inc. will spin off the entire AOL Internet unit by the end of the year, reversing a failed $124 billion merger that triggered record losses.

AOL’s online advertising and Internet-access businesses will be separated into an independent, publicly traded company, New York-based Time Warner said today in a statement.

And:


Time Warner’s 95 percent stake in AOL is worth about $6.3 billion, including about $3.4 billion for the advertising business and $2.8 billion for the access division, David Joyce, an analyst with Miller Tabak & Co., estimated in a report yesterday.

When Google bought a 5 percent stake in AOL for $1 billion in 2005, it valued the unit at about $20 billion. Time Warner said last month it was in talks to buy back the stake. Google wrote down $726 million of the investment last year.

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