Especially given the way it all turned out, many have painted the AOL/Time Warner merger as a smash-and-grab job: savvy Internet punks swooping in and taking advantage of clueless old-media types. In some sense, it’s hard not to see the merger as a cynical ploy for AOL to cash in on its market cap before its business model collapsed. But, from another angle, Steve Case probably made the most rational move on behalf of his shareholders. “We all knew we were living on borrowed time and had to buy something of substance by using that huge currency,” one AOL executive said later.34 “We didn’t use
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