AOL-Time Warner

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The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return by Mihir Desai

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, assortative mating, Benoit Mandelbrot, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, carried interest, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, follow your passion, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, housing crisis, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jony Ive, Kenneth Rogoff, longitudinal study, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, Monty Hall problem, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, principal–agent problem, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, tontine, transaction costs, vertical integration, zero-sum game

New York Times, February 27, 2016. The account of the AOL–Time Warner merger is based on Okrent, Daniel. “AOL–Time Warner Merger: Happily Ever After?” Time, January 24, 2000; Klein, Alec. Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003; Munk, Nina. Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner. New York: Harper-Business, 2004; Arango, Tim. “How the AOL–Time Warner Merger Went So Wrong.” New York Times, January 10, 2010; Marriage from Hell: The Breakup of AOL Time Warner. United States: CNBC, January 6, 2010. News Documentary; Barnett, Emma, and Amanda Andrews.

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Depending on how you count it, over $200 billion in market value was destroyed. It’s little solace to the shareholders and employees that got crushed in the AOL–Time Warner merger, but the truth is that many, and some say most, mergers fail. And the failures of AOL–Time Warner are representative of the most common mistakes. So, what went wrong in the marriage of AOL and Time Warner? Just about everything—and, in fact, the mistakes read like a playbook for disaster drawn from the finance folklore of what makes mergers succeed or fail. With only minimal revision, the mistakes of AOL –Time Warner might just as easily be a playbook for disaster drawn from matrimonial folklore of what makes marriages succeed or fail—just substitute people for the companies and see if works for you. 1.

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“the Time Warner–AOL merger should”: Arango, “How the AOL–Time Warner Merger Went So Wrong.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/business/media/11merger.html. “It was the biggest mistake”: Barnett and Andrews, “AOL Merger Was the Biggest Mistake in Corporate History, Believes Time Warner Chief Jeff Bewkes.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/media/8031227/AOL-merger-was-the-biggest-mistake-in-corporate-history-believes-Time-Warner-chief-Jeff-Bewkes.html. “we need to”: Munk, Fools Rush In, 264. “like different species”: in Arango, “How the AOL–Time Warner Merger Went So Wrong.” “Thomas Edison”: Perez-Pena, “Time Warner Board Backs AOL Spinoff.” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/business/media/29warner.html.

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, British Empire, Burning Man, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eben Moglen, Ford Model T, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, open economy, packet switching, PageRank, profit motive, radical decentralization, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, seminal paper, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

CHAPTER 19: A SURPRISING WRECK 1. As told to The New York Times in Tim Arango, “How the AOL–Time Warner Merger Went So Wrong,” New York Times, January 10, 2010. For other sources on the AOL–Time Warner merger, see Johnnie L. Roberts, “How It All Fell Apart,” Newsweek, December 9, 2002, and three books: Nina Munk, Fools Rush In (New York: HarperCollins, 2004); Alec Klein, Stealing TIME: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003); and Kara Swisher, There Must Be a Pony In Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future (New York: Crown Business, 2003). 2.

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The early 2000s might have turned into a war of accumulation among three vertically integrated great powers: Microsoft-GE (NBC’s parent), AOL Time Warner, and Comcast-Disney. Eventually everything on the Internet would have been owned by one of them. That would have made for a tidier information economy, centered mainly on two mega-industries: the media conglomerates and the telephone companies. But something went wrong. Microsoft stopped buying media. Disney rejected Comcast’s merger offers. And AOL Time Warner became the textbook example of what not to do—as Ken Auletta calls it, “the Merger from Hell.”11 WHAT HAPPENED? The books about the AOL Time Warner saga are the work of business reporters and as such tend to focus on the personalities, clashes of corporate cultures, and terse boardroom encounters.

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And within three months of that rendezvous on the reviewing stand, on January 10, 2000, they were holding a press conference to announce their own revolution: a $350 billion merger between the world’s biggest media company and biggest Internet firm. AOL would be the engine that brought Time Warner’s old media holdings—a treasury of what was becoming known as “content”—into the new world. It was an effusive spectacle. Levin said “We’ve become a company of high-fives and hugs.” Ted Turner, the largest individual shareholder, likened it to “the first time I made love some forty-two years ago.”5 It looked as if the future had indeed arrived. To many it seemed that the Internet would eventually belong to vertically integrated giants on the model of AOL Time Warner. Here’s Steve Lohr writing in The New York Times in 2000: “The America Online–Time Warner merger [will] create a powerhouse for the next phase of Internet business: selling information and entertainment services to consumers who may tap into them using digital cell phones, handheld devices and television set-top boxes in addition to personal computers.”6 In time, it was envisioned, three or four consolidated firms—say, AOL Time Warner, Microsoft-Disney, and perhaps Comcast-NBC—would slowly divide up the juiciest Internet properties, such as Yahoo!

It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO by Felix Gillette, John Koblin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, Exxon Valdez, fake news, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, Keith Raniere, lockdown, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, out of africa, payday loans, peak TV, period drama, recommendation engine, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Durst, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, WeWork

Wall Street’s strong initial support for the deal was disappearing. By the summer of 2002, AOL Time Warner shares were trading near an all-time low, having lost more than 80 percent of their value over the past year, erasing billions of dollars in value. Analysts and investors were apoplectic. HBO staffers, many of whom had large amounts of their personal nest eggs tied up in company stock, were also growing deeply embittered. From day one, staffers were free to sell off their newly converted AOL Time Warner stock, but were discouraged from doing so. Word circulated around the offices that if you cashed in a lot of AOL Time Warner stock at one time, you were likely to get a stern note from the bosses in corporate.

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The men donned suits, tailored button-down shirts, well-appointed cuff links, and designer ties. While the AOL deal would ultimately fail to disrupt the future of media, it did succeed briefly at disrupting the prevailing wardrobe at Time Warner. Styles in the C-suite changed overnight. Longtime HBO staffers watched with some dismay as members of the company’s senior management team began adopting the khaki-infused style of the AOL tribe. A smattering of business casual could be seen blooming in every AOL Time Warner conference room. Gerald Levin, a reliable suit-and-tie man for decades, started showing up in public wearing denim shirts and suede shoes that looked like slippers.

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He wanted to show the business world that it was possible for the top executive at the most powerful media conglomerate on the planet to relinquish control of the company without dying or being fired. His existence, he told reporters, was about more than just AOL Time Warner earnings. “I need to reclaim my identity,” he said. “I’m about to demonstrate the real me.” After leaving AOL Time Warner, Levin would soon divorce his wife, leave New York City, marry a clairvoyant healer, grow a beard, and become the director of the Moonview Sanctuary, a holistic wellness institute in Santa Monica, California, with a yoga room, a collection of hand drums, a marble statue of Buddha, and an outsize gong.

Cable Cowboy by Mark Robichaux

AOL-Time Warner, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Bear Stearns, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, corporate raider, cotton gin, estate planning, fear of failure, financial engineering, Irwin Jacobs, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mutually assured destruction, oil rush, profit maximization, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Telecommunications Act of 1996, vertical integration

Before the meeting concluded, the men brief ly discussed another subject: America Online. At the time, Levin was terrified that AOL would use its pumped-up market capitalization to attempt a hostile takeover of Time Warner. Thanks to the Internet inf lation in the financial markets, AOL had twice the market capitalization of Time Warner and had hired bankers in the summer to plot strategic possibilities. Hindery, a longtime cable guy, closed ranks with Time Warner and promised that AT&T would never talk with AOL without talking to Time Warner first. The men even discussed a poison pill for Time Warner Entertainment. Armstrong also needed a pact with Cablevision Systems Corporation, the Long Island, New York–based cable empire headed by cable pioneer Charles Dolan.

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A parade of companies would follow the template set in the AT&T deal, merging, investing, and chasing the grand vision of offering consumers a nonstop stream of information and entertainment—and many would fall short. Just weeks after AOL and Time Warner merged, the Internet bubble burst, sending values of online firms tumbling. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, further accelerated a recession that battered media stocks in nearly every sector. Synergies and savings were elusive. By 2002, AOL–Time Warner would lose more than $100 billion in shareholder value since the merger announcement, amid rumors the behemouth might be dismantled. Vivendi, a French water utility that remade itself into a global media giant with the purchase of Seagram Company’s Universal Studios and other properties, nearly choked in the process, losing half its stock value.

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Microsoft, which had acquired Media One’s 29.9 percent stake in Telewest a year earlier, and was also a minority partner in UGC, was as eager as Malone to push overseas for new business. When AT&T conceded that its cable systems were formally up for sale, AOL Time Warner and Cox jumped into the fray. Microsoft lurked in the wings, too, promising to back the Cox and Comcast bids in order to block the only other broadband behemoth it 275 9486_Robichaux_03.f.qxd 8/28/02 9:54 AM Page 276 276 C A B L E C O W B OY considered a real threat, AOL Time Warner. Handicapping who would end up with the TCI and Media One cable systems came down to this: Who could craft the most lucrative, face-saving offer for Mike Armstrong?

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig

AltaVista, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, business process, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, dark matter, decentralized internet, Dennis Ritchie, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Erik Brynjolfsson, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, history of Unix, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, invention of hypertext, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, Larry Wall, Leonard Kleinrock, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, smart grid, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systematic bias, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

AS THE CLINTON administration came to an end, one of the last acts of the (by statute, at least, neutral) Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was a sign of some hope. After a long and extensive investigation into the risks of the proposed AOL-Time Warner merger, the FTC, led by its chairman, Robert Pitofsky, conditioned the merger of AOL and Time Warner upon the essential elements of open access. Access to the cable broadband pipes must be kept open, the FTC insisted. Nonaffiliated content must flow without hindrance from AOL or Time Warner. And this unhindered access must include access to Internet-active TV.45 This decision by the FTC was an important breakthrough in the attitude of the government.

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Powerful corporations like AT&T and the proposed AOL Time Warner would have the power to balkanize the broadband Internet for their own purposes, with no legal reason to open their networks to competitors.” “Convergence Raises Concerns About Access,” New York Times, January 31, 2000, available at http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/ 01/biztech/articles/31digi.html. 45 See Federal Trade Commission, “FTC Approves AOL/Time Warner Merger with Conditions,” December 14, 2000, http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2000/12/aol.htm; Federal Trade Commission, Docket No. C-3989. See also John R. Wilke, “AOL and Time-Warner Pledge Cable Access to Ease FTC Fears,” Wall Street Journal, December 14, 2000. 46 Or alternatively, a tragedy of an anticommons.

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Instead, AT&T began to argue that the market should regulate cable, and the government should stand aside. This would become a familiar pattern. In January 2000, AOL and Time Warner announced to a startled world that they had agreed to merge. Time Warner owned many cable companies; these cable companies would serve AOL content at high speed. AOL had many Internet customers. These customers would be able to get access to Time Warner content. The merger was an ideal opportunity, both companies argued, for synergy in this market. The old and the new would form together one of the most important media companies in the world.

As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Work, Health & Wealth by Juan Enriquez

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, borderless world, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, creative destruction, digital divide, double helix, Ford Model T, global village, Gregor Mendel, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Helicobacter pylori, Howard Rheingold, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, new economy, personalized medicine, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, spice trade, stem cell, the new new thing, yottabyte

(At the end of 1997, Time Warner’s assets were about forty times those of AOL … But the Internet boom changed things … So did AoL’s 27 million subscribers.) The speed and scope of technological change is such that … AOL became twice as valuable as Time Warner … And became the lead company … In the world’s largest merger. (A new company that expects to be Microsoft’s main competitor … By January 2001 AOL Time Warner controlled 33 percent of Americans’ time on the Net … Yahoo! had 7 percent … Microsoft 6 percent.) Things change very quickly in a digital world. Even companies … That have more cash … That have more information … And that have become larger … Than most national economies … Are by no means guaranteed survival … Either they get smarter … And grow … Or someone will eat them up.6 THE POWER OF TECHNOLOGY … TO BUILD … AND DESTROY … IS SUCH … THAT IT IS LIKELY … FEW OF US HAVE EVER HEARD … THE NAME OF WHAT WILL BE THE WORLD’S LARGEST COMPANY … IN 2020.

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Technology companies are getting very large … and very powerful… Microsoft’s stock value … Before a judge ruled it a monopoly … Was approaching the value … Of everything Canada produced in one year. In the first quarter of 2000, AOL Time Warner’s market value was greater than everything produced during 1998 by all those who lived in a country like … OR LOOK AT IT A DIFFERENT WAY … OF ALL THE WORLD’S 190 “OFFICIAL” COUNTRIES … LESS THAN ONE-TENTH PRODUCED ENOUGH WEALTH IN 1998 … TO BE ABLE TO BUY AOL TIME WARNER. Even products that … Are by no means essential … That can be substituted by something cheaper … Or by something made locally … Or by products that are healthier … Can dominate using … Talent, scale, and know-how … AND THE LOGIC OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM IS … THAT ONE MUST DOMINATE … THE WHOLE … WORLD … FAST.

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A language we cannot speak or read directly … We have to use chips and machines to understand. (This is different from communicating in, say, English-Chinese-English. No human translator can take the raw code inside a floppy disk, cell phone, pager, or TV and simultaneously tell you what it says.) Digital code is what drives rapid growth today. It allows mergers like AOL Time Warner … It drives the Internet, TV, music, finance, IT, news coverage, research, manufacturing. A few countries and companies understood this change. That is how poor countries like Finland, Singapore, and Taiwan got so wealthy … So quickly … But a lot of folks just did not learn to read and write a new language … And even though they produced more and more goods, particularly commodities … And even though they restructured companies and governments … Cut budgets, raised taxes, built large factories and buildings … They got a lot poorer.

Beyond the Random Walk: A Guide to Stock Market Anomalies and Low Risk Investing by Vijay Singal

3Com Palm IPO, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, book value, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, correlation coefficient, cross-subsidies, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, endowment effect, fixed income, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, junk bonds, liberal capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market friction, market microstructure, mental accounting, merger arbitrage, Myron Scholes, new economy, prediction markets, price stability, profit motive, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, survivorship bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, transaction costs, uptick rule, Vanguard fund

They prefer a stock payment because of tax implications but would like to receive cash because there is no uncertainty about the amount of money. As an example, consider the AOL–Time Warner merger, where AOL agreed to pay 1.5 shares of its stock for each share of Time Warner stock. AOL’s price before announcement of the bid was $73 per share. With a 1.5 share ratio, Time Warner shareholders expect to receive $109.50 for each share. If AOL’s stock price fell to $35, Time Warner shareholders would receive only $52.50, introducing uncertainty into the amount received by the target firm. Collars are a recent innovation, a way of partially addressing both bidder and target concerns.

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STOCK MERGERS—SINGLE BID When the target’s stock price does not rise to the bidder’s offer, traders can make arbitrage profits by strategic execution. An all-stock merger such as America Online’s (NYSE: AOL) acquisition of Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) is a good example. The merger was announced after the close on January 7, 2000 (a Friday). AOL agreed to pay 1.5 shares for each share of Time Warner. On the next trading day (January 10, 2000), AOL closed at $71.88 and Time Warner closed at $90.06. Based on AOL’s offer of 1.5 shares and it’s closing price, Time Warner should have closed at $107.82. The speculation spread in this case is $17.76 ($107.82—$90.06), or 19.7 percent. An arbitrageur could buy one share of Time Warner at $90.06 (pays $90.06) and short-sell 1.5 shares of America Online at $71.88 (receives $107.82).

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For example, Fred Alger Management (manager of Alger mutual funds) changed its holdings to take advantage of the AOL–Time Warner merger that was announced in January 2000, as the numbers below illustrate. Fred Alger Management sold several million shares of AOL (acquirer) while at the same time increasing its stake in Time Warner (target).7 Note that the reduction in AOL shares is larger than the increase in Time Warner, in part due to the exchange ratio of 1.5 AOL shares for each Time Warner share. Holdings Time Warner AOL December 1999 51,900 6,915,790 March 2000 1,584,000 4,297,950 Change +1,532,100 –2,617,840 The above discussion shows that it is possible to get reasonable returns by using funds specializing in merger arbitrage.

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs by Guy Raz

Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, business logic, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fear of failure, glass ceiling, growth hacking, housing crisis, imposter syndrome, inventory management, It's morning again in America, iterative process, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tony Hsieh, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Only a company that has lost its way a little bit, that doesn’t know precisely what business it’s actually in, tends to fight itself like this. Andy only needed to look twenty blocks uptown from his New York office and a few years into the past, at AOL Time Warner and the titanic merger that created the company in 2000, to see what the worst possible version of this might look like. When AOL and Time Warner merged, a lot was made of the new media entity’s size and market cap. The potential created by both teams leveraging the assets they brought to the table was difficult to contemplate let alone calculate. The merger was valued at $165 billion, but that was probably just a guess.

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With a strong culture unified by a larger mission and propelled by people who were all rowing in the same direction, they could have even leveraged the obstacles they faced into opportunities. Except inside AOL Time Warner, there was no unity to be found, and within a decade the merger would be dead. Both companies would lose more than 85 percent of their premerger value. Time Warner would eventually spin off its cable business (Time Warner Cable), it’s publishing business (Time Inc.), and, of course, AOL, which would reenter a radically transformed digital media landscape as a wandering shell of its former self. The smaller Time Warner rebranded itself as WarnerMedia, which was ultimately sold to AT&T for around $85 billion in 2018.

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In the aftermath of the merger’s unwinding (which occurred at roughly the same time Andy and Brian unwound their partnership at Bonobos, coincidentally), analysts and participants alike pointed to the schism between the AOL folks down in Virginia and the Time Warner folks up in New York as one of the principal reasons for the company’s failure to find its way through the turbulent waters of the dot-com recession. There was always great talk about “building synergy” between AOL and Time Warner, but in the end that turned out to be an illusory goal. “Some of it was the fights within the company,” Steve Case, AOL’s chairman, told me. “It was a mix of different factors but at the end of the day it’s about people and it’s about teams.”

The Accidental Investment Banker: Inside the Decade That Transformed Wall Street by Jonathan A. Knee

AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, Boycotts of Israel, business logic, call centre, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, deal flow, discounted cash flows, fear of failure, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, if you build it, they will come, iterative process, junk bonds, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, proprietary trading, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, technology bubble, young professional, éminence grise

Some of the most entertaining reading in any pitch book are the tortured footnotes to these league tables that allow anybody with a semistraight face to claim they are number one: “includes transactions over $500 closed since January 1, XXXX,” “excludes transactions over $500 closed since January 1, XXXX,” “league tables are for transactions other than Comcast/AT&T and AOL/Time Warner,” and so on. Many an analyst has spent many a sleepless night cutting and recutting the data to come up with the least ridiculous way to demonstrate number one market share. They could be forgiven for their occasional temptation to throw up their hands and simply include an omnibus league table page for all products, for all times that would simply read: WE HAVE 100% MARKET SHARE OF ALL DEALS WE DID.

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Although Perella had made his bones in the industry as an M&A practitioner, he had demonstrated extraordinary effectiveness as a senior coverage officer. An impressive number of Morgan’s high-profile banking successes across many industries—from the combination of Sandoz with Ciba-Geigy to the AOL Time Warner merger—would have Perella’s fingerprints on them. Despite his formidable track record, and Perella’s willingness to go to any meeting if asked, many bankers thought twice before calling Perella in as “senior air cover” on an account. Perella refused to be used as a mere prop for new business pitches.

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We came up with the bright idea of organizing an “Internet Media Conference” in part to satisfy our clients whom we could never actually get invited to Mary’s “real” Internet conference—one of the street’s hottest tickets—but also as a subtle way to credentialize our traditional media analysts as having all-important Web savvy. I was responsible for organizing the conference and kept Mary and her “gatekeepers” informed. By early 2000, I had already gotten commitments from Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone and AOL Time Warner CEO Jerry Levin to speak and had sent out save-the-date cards to investors announcing the conference for that summer. Then I got the call I had been dreading. “Mary says you can’t call it Internet Media,” said the gatekeeper. “Why?” I asked. “It will confuse investors,” said the gatekeeper, “and besides she really hasn’t been involved in the organization.”

Culture works: the political economy of culture by Richard Maxwell

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, business process, commoditize, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, intermodal, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, post-Fordism, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, streetcar suburb, structural adjustment programs, talking drums, telemarketer, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Thorstein Veblen, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture

The two mergers involve telecommunication companies marrying the United States’ two largest cable providers, in part to extend their grasp over future broadband customers. Had American and European regulators not applied pressure and set conditions for the AOL Time Warner merger, the new company could have reduced competition drastically by combining the United States’ secondlargest cable company with its dominant Internet service provider (ISP). In response to complaints from consumer advocates and competitors, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) required AOL to continue offering reasonably priced DSL services to customers in cities where Time Warner was also selling broadband access via its monopoly cable systems. The merged company was required to offer subscribers a choice of at least three ISPs besides its own on its cable systems, ending Time Warner’s practice of forcing its own ISP on cable customers.

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On the other hand, the large studios continue to command the lion’s share of markets and revenues by financing independent producers and controlling distribution channels. The studios’ power has only been strengthened as they have become part of larger, horizontally integrated entertainment conglomerates (AOL Time Warner, Sony, News Corp, etc.) that can provide financing and promote their products across many media outlets. What does this have to do with PCs and how they access the Web? First, it draws our attention to control over finance and distribution bottlenecks as the key source of profit and power in media markets.

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CEO Bill Gates raised the specter of Microsoft becoming the universal middleman of the twenty-first century when he announced that “this new, electronic world of the information highway will generate a higher volume of transactions than anything has to date, and we’re proposing that Windows be at the center, servicing all those transactions.”32 The company’s chief technology officer has said that it hoped to charge a “vig” or vigorish on every Web transaction that uses Microsoft technology.33 Equally disturbing, an unbridled Microsoft could use its power to shape the news and culture that Web surfers find when they follow the path of least resistance into cyberspace and end up at one of Microsoft’s sites. Mergers between AT&T and Media-One, and America Online (AOL) and Time Warner, reflect another major bid to control Internet distribution, this time by locking up the emerging market for high-speed broadband service. Broadband connections, which can be made through digital subscriber line (DSL) via phone lines or cable modems, offer faster download times that enable interactive voice and television service.

The Intelligent Investor (Collins Business Essentials) by Benjamin Graham, Jason Zweig

3Com Palm IPO, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, corporate governance, corporate raider, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, George Santayana, hiring and firing, index fund, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, new economy, passive investing, price stability, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, the market place, the rule of 72, transaction costs, tulip mania, VA Linux, Vanguard fund, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Any established company that reprices options—as dozens of high-tech firms have—is a disgrace. And any investor who buys stock in such a company is a sheep begging to be sheared. By looking in the annual report for the mandatory footnote about stock options, you can see how large the “option overhang” is. AOL Time Warner, for example, reported in the front of its annual report that it had 4.5 billion shares of common stock outstanding as of December 31, 2002—but a footnote in the bowels of the report reveals that the company had issued options on 657 million more shares. So AOL’s future earnings will have to be divided among 15% more shares.

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The stock, which had closed at $58.90 at year-end 2001, finished 2002 at $17.08—a loss of 71% in twelve months.4 A Minnow Swallows a Whale On January 10, 2000, America Online, Inc. and Time Warner Inc. announced that they would merge in a deal initially valued at $156 billion. As of December 31, 1999, AOL had $10.3 billion in assets, and its revenues over the previous 12 months had amounted to $5.7 billion. Time Warner, on the other hand, had $51.2 billion in assets and revenues of $27.3 billion. Time Warner was a vastly bigger company by any measure except one: the valuation of its stock. Because America Online bedazzled investors simply by being in the Internet industry, its stock sold for a stupendous 164 times its earnings.

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Stock in Time Warner, a grab bag of cable television, movies, music, and magazines, sold for around 50 times earnings. In announcing the deal, the two companies called it a “strategic merger of equals.” Time Warner’s chairman, Gerald M. Levin, declared that “the opportunities are limitless for everyone connected to AOL Time Warner”—above all, he added, for its shareholders. Ecstatic that their stock might finally get the cachet of an Internet darling, Time Warner shareholders overwhelmingly approved the deal. But they overlooked a few things: This “merger of equals” was designed to give America Online’s shareholders 55% of the combined company—even though Time Warner was five times bigger.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

A venerable conglomerate with real assets including a film library, magazine empire, theme parks, movie studios, and thousands of miles of television cable was about to merge with the guys who mailed shrink-wrapped “10 Hours Free Access” CDs to pretty much every home in America. According to the terms of the deal, the two companies would combine into one, with AOL shareholders owning 55 percent and Time Warner just 45 percent of the new company’s stock. How could America Online, a company with virtually no real assets, accomplish such a feat? Yes, AOL had accumulated a few million users, but for several months I had been hearing that the new subscriber rate was actually slowing. The only thing peaking about AOL at the turn of the century was its stock price.

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Then, all of a sudden, the move made sense to the video game geek within me: AOL was spending its “in-world” fantasy money. AOL founder Steve Case was cashing in his chips, exchanging his speculative dotcom paper assets for a majority stake in a real company with real assets. Moreover, if he was choosing to do it now, it meant he believed that his AOL stock had hit its all-time high. To me, AOL’s purchase of Time Warner suggested that what then-Fed chair Alan Greenspan had called the “irrational exuberance” surrounding technology stocks had climaxed: the dotcom boom was ending. So I wrote all this down and sent it to the editor by the 3 pm deadline. An hour later, the phone rang. “We can’t run this!” he said.

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The excitement around digital culture, the sexiness of people engaging with one another through media or making new software for free instead of simply watching television all night, was being leveraged to hype a big deal on the old economy’s stock exchange. Digital innovations were no longer about changing the world, but keeping the old system firmly in place. Two months later, the dotcom bubble burst, the NASDAQ crashed, and the very same newspapers that had celebrated the AOL–Time Warner merger were now decrying it as an epic failure on the part of Time Warner’s CEO, a former director of the New York Stock Exchange no less, Gerald Levin. People blamed his poor judgment on the trauma of losing his son, and watched, stunned, as $200 billion of shareholder money seemingly evaporated.

Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix by Dade Hayes, Dawn Chmielewski

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, borderless world, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, digital rights, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, hockey-stick growth, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, late fees, lockdown, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, Netflix Prize, Osborne effect, performance metric, period drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, QR code, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, remote working, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech bro, the long tail, the medium is the message, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, vertical integration, WeWork

By far the most unfortunate aftereffect of the merger’s meltdown was that it made the company look askance at technology. The “innovator’s dilemma” described throughout this book is perhaps nowhere more evident than at AOL Time Warner in the 2000s. Jonathan Miller, chairman and CEO of AOL from 2002 to 2006, recalled bringing several potential acquisitions and joint venture proposals to the Time Warner board and to Jeff Bewkes and Dick Parsons, then president and CEO, respectively. Green-lighting many of them would likely have set the company—and the media and tech industries—on a dramatically different course.

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Intertainer’s premature death, in 2002, could be traced to the studios’ decision to pull back all the rights and control internet distribution themselves, through a Sony-led venture called Moviefly (and later renamed Movielink). “In one week, we went from having about eight thousand movies on the service to having about eight,” Taplin said. “So, I had no choice but to shut it down.” Taplin sued Sony Pictures, Universal Studios, and AOL Time Warner (then parent of Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema), claiming the studios stole his idea and reneged on agreements to provide Intertainer their movies. After a three-year court battle, the case was resolved with a settlement in the tens of millions. But it was a pyrrhic victory for Taplin, who effectively ended his film career when he chose to take on the studios.

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In many ways, the streaming version of HBO was the entertainment equivalent of universal health care legislation that finally made it through Congress in watered-down form. It followed more than a decade of active exploration of digital alternatives at HBO and Time Warner, which infamously bore the official name AOL Time Warner from 2001 to 2003. The disastrous merger with America Online was one of the biggest debacles in U.S. corporate history, but it somehow managed not to torpedo Time Warner. In that period, the entertainment side of the house was firing on all cylinders, releasing films like the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings franchises and a string of TV hits produced by Warner Bros.

High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline by Jim Rasenberger

AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, collective bargaining, Donald Trump, East Village, Ford Model T, illegal immigration, Lewis Mumford, MITM: man-in-the-middle, scientific management, strikebreaker, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, union organizing, urban planning, vertical integration, young professional

I’m a Center for the Performing Arts! I’m the Center of Everything! First and foremost, the building would serve as corporate headquarters of Time Warner—or AOL Time Warner, as the company called itself back then. Including offices and studios for various branches of the entertainment and news divisions, the company would occupy about 854,000 square feet of space, most of this on the lowest 10 floors of the building. The merger of AOL and Time Warner in January of 2000 had spawned the largest media company in the world, instantly worth 342 billion dollars. These conjoined towers would represent more than office space: they would represent corporate dominance.

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That was the idea, anyway, back in that heady time, before the conglomerate foundered and jettisoned AOL from its name. For the moment, the business of AOL Time Warner—communications—was the red-hot center of the American economy, very much as steel had been a hundred years earlier. “Global media,” said Gerald Levin, then CEO of Time Warner, “will be and is fast becoming the predominant business force of the twenty-first century.” AOL Time Warner, much like that corporate behemoth of a century earlier, U.S. Steel, aspired to vertical integration of its industry, only now the plan had a new name: “synergy.”

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A few moments later, out of sight from the crowd, the crane laid the beam on the 22nd floor of the south tower, where it would rest and rust and await removal to its final berth on the 24th floor. For the moment, there was no 24th floor. In all the many speeches made that morning, no one mentioned the astonishing decline of AOL Time Warner’s stock over the last year. Attendees politely skipped over the fact that the company had lost about half its value since AOL and Time Warner merged the previous winter, and that the merger, barely a year old, was already looking like a colossal debacle. (The company would eventually concede as much, deleting AOL’s acronym from its name, and from the building once intended to bear it.)

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, emotional labour, game design, hive mind, index card, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, popular electronics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds, traveling salesman, twin studies, Walter Mischel, web application, white flight

Behavioral economists have long observed that executives buying companies can get so excited about beating out their competitors that they ignore signs that they’re overpaying. This happens so frequently that it has a name: “deal fever,” followed by “the winner’s curse.” The AOL–Time Warner merger, which wiped out $200 billion of Time Warner shareholder value, is a classic example. There were plenty of warnings that AOL’s stock, which was the currency for the merger, was wildly overvalued, yet Time Warner’s directors approved the deal unanimously. “I did it with as much or more excitement and enthusiasm as I did when I first made love some forty-two years ago,” exclaimed Ted Turner, one of those directors and the largest individual shareholder in the company.

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Stalin refused to believe that the Germans would invade Russia in 1941, even after ninety warnings of an impending attack. See Dominic D. P. Johnson, Overconfidence and War: The Havoc and Glory of Positive Illusions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 3. The AOL–Time Warner merger: Nina Monk, Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time-Warner (New York: HarperCollins, 2005). 4. They protect themselves better from the downside: The psychology professor Richard Howard, in an interview with the author on November 17, 2008, notes that introverts tend to down-regulate positive emotions and extroverts tend to up-regulate them. 5. our limbic system: Note that these days many scientists dislike the phrase “limbic system.”

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“A lot of antisocial and self-defeating behavior results from people who amplify positive emotions.” Another disadvantage of buzz may be its connection to risk—sometimes outsized risk. Buzz can cause us to ignore warning signs we should be heeding. When Ted Turner (who appears to be an extreme extrovert) compared the AOL–Time Warner deal to his first sexual experience, he may have been telling us that he was in the same buzzy state of mind as an adolescent who’s so excited about spending the night with his new girlfriend that he’s not thinking much about the consequences. This blindness to danger may explain why extroverts are more likely than introverts to be killed while driving, be hospitalized as a result of accident or injury, smoke, have risky sex, participate in high-risk sports, have affairs, and remarry.

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, death of newspapers, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, facts on the ground, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google Earth, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, spectrum auction, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, X Prize, yield management, zero-sum game

As the CEO of Viacom, he represented the world’s then fourth-largest media company—the owner of the CBS network, of TV and radio stations, Paramount Studios, MTV and its sister cable networks, Simon & Schuster publishers, Blockbuster video, and an outdoor advertising concern, among other holdings. Short and pugnacious, Karmazin was by his own admission “always paranoid” about competitors. Two of Viacom’s biggest competitors, AOL and Time Warner, had merged to forge the world’s largest media conglomerate, and Karmazin was on the prowl for new business partners. The son of a Queens cab driver, Karmazin, then fifty-nine, had begun his career at age seventeen selling radio advertising. He was said to be so pushy that advertisers capitulated just so he would leave their offices.

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The networks responded to the decline by cutting costs, buying local TV stations and cable properties, producing and syndicating more of their own shows, and—like the movie studios—putting their faith in hits like NBC’s Seinfeld, to save them. The media buzzwords were convergence and synergy. The common credo was that the advantage accrued to vertically integrated corporate giants—to Viacom, AOL Time Warner, News Corporation, Disney, Gannett, Tribune—those able to control every step in the process from an idea to its manufacture to its distribution. The synergies would come not from partnering with other companies but from owning content and the means to distribute it. With that in mind, media companies pushed to blur the borders between traditional industries: broadcast networks acquired cable networks; telephone companies acquired cable distribution companies; cable system owners invested in content companies and telephone services; Hollywood studios bought broadcast networks along with music and game and book companies; newspapers bought local cable and radio.

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There were, added a still stunned Miller, “no lawyers, no nothing.” Google won the prize. The second victory came a year later, in the fall of 2005. Tim Armstrong was attending meetings in Mountain View when Eric Schmidt entered and whispered, “We’re about to lose AOL to Microsoft.” The merger between AOL and Time Warner was not working; the touted synergies had not materialized. Into this chaos stepped Microsoft, determined to catch up in search. Back when Google was still headquartered in a garage, Gates and Microsoft had had it within their grasp to build a powerful search engine when it purchased an online advertising company, LinkExchange.

Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky's Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent by Joel Spolsky

AOL-Time Warner, Build a better mousetrap, David Heinemeier Hansson, functional programming, knowledge worker, linear programming, no silver bullet, nuclear winter, off-by-one error, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, Superbowl ad, the scientific method, type inference, unpaid internship

Because the more people you added to that team, the more likely they would be to have one real grump who thought it was unprofessional and immature to write “Most things actually work” on your website. Not to mention the comment, “Winamp 3: Almost as new as Winamp 2!” That kind of stuff is what made us love Winamp. By the time AOL Time Warner Corporate Weenieheads got their hands on that thing, the funny stuff from the website was gone. You can just see them, fuming and festering and sniveling like Salieri in the movie Amadeus, trying to beat down all signs of creativity that might scare one old lady in Minnesota, at the cost of wiping out anything that might have made people like the product. 13 14 Smart and Gets Things Done Or look at the iPod.

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Even if your UI design skills are lacking, as long as you force yourself to do hallway usability tests, which cost nothing, your UI will be much, much better. INDEX NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS 37signals, use of Ruby on Rails for applications, 61 A Advice for Computer Science College Students, on joelonsoftware.com, 78 Aeron chairs (Herman Miller), 48–50 AOL Time Warner, change of Winamp advertising by, 13 Austin, Robert D., Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations by, 126 B back of the envelope questions, using in interviews, 115–116 Braithwaite, Reg, “My favourite interview question” by, 87 Bionic Office, 44 Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell, 84 Brooks’ Law, regarding adding programmers, 10–11 Brooks, Frederick, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering by, 10 172 Index bugs fixing before writing new code, 157–160 keeping a bug database, 156–157 C candidates, 98 chairs, buying best for programmer comfort, 48–52 chief software engineer, criteria for hiring, 81 Command and Control method based on military management, 135–140 drawbacks to in high-tech teams, 136–138 understanding military use of, 138–140 consumer electronics, 14–15 Cornell, Gary, a typical problem to simplify (personal interview), 108 Converting Capital Into Software The Works, on joelonsoftware.com, 1 cover letters, 67, 69–71, 77 Crossgain, noncompete agreement problems at, 36 “Crossgain vs.

The Investment Checklist: The Art of In-Depth Research by Michael Shearn

accelerated depreciation, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, business cycle, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, compound rate of return, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, do what you love, electricity market, estate planning, financial engineering, Henry Singleton, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, London Interbank Offered Rate, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, Network effects, PalmPilot, pink-collar, risk tolerance, shareholder value, six sigma, Skype, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, technology bubble, Teledyne, time value of money, transaction costs, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional

Steve Case, founder and former chief executive officer and chairman of America Online (AOL), stated, “Now that the AOL Time Warner merger has closed, we have a new company for a new world—one poised to spark a transformation of the media and communications landscape—connecting, informing, and entertaining people in innovative ways that will enrich their lives.”16 Case further explained, “These unmatched assets position AOL Time Warner to speed the development of the interactive medium and capitalize on such transformational opportunities as digital music, interactive television and broadband Internet services.”17 Shortly after the merger, the share price of AOL Time Warner dropped 90 percent from its peak value.18 If the business is healthy, it will usually be able to attract higher offers.

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Mattel at Banc of America Securities 33rd Annual Investment Conference, (Robert Eckert, CEO of Mattel), September 17, 2003, Fair Disclosure Wire, September 17, 2003. 16. Case, Stephen. “Thinking Ahead.” Executive Excellence, June 2001, p. 8. 17. “America Online and Time Warner Complete Merger to Create AOL Time Warner.” BusinessWire, January 11, 2001. 18. Standard & Poor’s Capital IQ. 19. Stoessel, Eric. “Hotel Sales are Hopping.” National Real Estate Investor. November-December 2010, p. 15. 20. Marr, Garry. “Brookfield Said Set to Re-open O&Y Bid: ‘Pennies’ Reported to be Standing in Way of a Deal.” Financial Post, August 25, 2005. 21.

file:///C:/Documents%20and%... by vpavan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, currency risk, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, John Bogle, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, margin call, Mary Meeker, money market fund, Myron Scholes, new economy, payment for order flow, price discovery process, profit motive, risk tolerance, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, tech worker, technology bubble, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, zero-coupon bond, éminence grise

Instead, companies must determine annually the value of the goodwill acquired, and must write down that value on their books if they determine that it has been "impaired," or lost value, since the purchase took place. AOL Time Warner Inc., the media titan created out of the merger of America Online and Time Warner, quickly showed how goodwill accounting changes can affect shareholders' interests, and laid bare the misjudgments of managers. AOL and Time Warner announced their merger in 2000, at the height of Internet frenzy. Once the merger was completed a year later, the combined company carried $127 billion in goodwill on its balance sheet.

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The 10-K is also where you will find the company's financial statements. This chapter will give you tools to pick apart each of the components of these statements. It will also explain some of the more popular devices companies have used to make their accounts seem rosier than they are. Such blue chips as Lucent, Motorola, AOL Time Warner, Cisco, and WorldCom have all played the numbers game. Unfortunately, you can't take the attitude that investing in high-quality companies protects you from accounting trickery. No company is completely immune from the pressure to cut corners. But many on Wall Street and in corporate America would have you believe that you need an accounting degree to understand financial statements.

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They also wave away the write-down because it involves no hard cash, and would have no effect on future earnings. But such huge write-offs of goodwill aren't meaningless, mechanical events. They show that both companies hugely overvalued themselves and caused shareholders to overpay when the two companies merged. And writing off $54 billion means AOL Time Warner is admitting that nearly 25 percent of its $200 billion in assets is suddenly worthless. Says Jack Ciesielski, publisher of the Analysts' Accounting Observer: "How could a value impairment of that size have escaped detection?" True, the FASB's new rule is forcing AOL's hand, he concedes, but the timing is suspicious.

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Yet it fell to the illusion of the Internet bubble, putting too much faith in the wisdom of the stock market: Time Warner agreed to merge with AOL on a 45/55 basis. AOL shareholders received 55 percent of the new entity, Time Warner 45 percent. It was the greatest heist by one set of shareholders of another in the history of mergers. It also turned out to be the finest irony of the dot-com boom. The one company that had the strongest financial metrics made its money from a dial-up service, but the whoosh-shiii-whoosh sound of slow phone modems connecting to AOL was not the future. Adding to the cruelty, Time Warner already owned its part of the high-speed broadband future—it controlled actual wires into millions of homes through Time Warner Cable.

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Even among those who gave this theory less than full credence, the view was that the market price could be off by only a bit; few thought the market could misprice an asset by a factor of one hundred. But of course it could, and it did. When the collective irrationality of the market came to bear, several of the highest-profile dot-com companies shed 99 percent of their value. This collapse was evident with AOL Time Warner. After AOL shareholders received the majority interest in the merged company, a decade later AOL was spun off again as an independent company. This time the market gave it a value of $2 billion, $198 billion below AOL’s peak at the height of the bubble. Yet for AOL, the company that owned HBO, CNN, TBS, a storied Hollywood studio, a record label, and a cable system had given up 55 percent of itself to avoid missing out on the Internet boom.

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postal service had funded: “Mail Service Drops Facsimile System,” New York Times, March 8, 1961. newspapers including the: See the editorial sections of the aforementioned publications on July 7, 1980. Von Meister soon formed: Alec Klein, Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 14–16. with great fanfare: Ibid., 15–16. wildly popular Commodore 64: Ibid., 33. Quantum had nearly: Ibid., 35. service America Online: Ibid., 45. $30 million in: America Online Inc., Annual Report (Washington DC: Securities and Exchange Commission, 1996).

Americana by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Yet it fell to the illusion of the Internet bubble, putting too much faith in the wisdom of the stock market: Time Warner agreed to merge with AOL on a 45/55 basis. AOL shareholders received 55 percent of the new entity, Time Warner 45 percent. It was the greatest heist by one set of shareholders of another in the history of mergers. It also turned out to be the finest irony of the dot-com boom. The one company that had the strongest financial metrics made its money from a dial-up service, but the whoosh-shiii-whoosh sound of slow phone modems connecting to AOL was not the future. Adding to the cruelty, Time Warner already owned its part of the high-speed broadband future—it controlled actual wires into millions of homes through Time Warner Cable.

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Even among those who gave this theory less than full credence, the view was that the market price could be off by only a bit; few thought the market could misprice an asset by a factor of one hundred. But of course it could, and it did. When the collective irrationality of the market came to bear, several of the highest-profile dot-com companies shed 99 percent of their value. This collapse was evident with AOL Time Warner. After AOL shareholders received the majority interest in the merged company, a decade later AOL was spun off again as an independent company. This time the market gave it a value of $2 billion, $198 billion below AOL’s peak at the height of the bubble. Yet for AOL, the company that owned HBO, CNN, TBS, a storied Hollywood studio, a record label, and a cable system had given up 55 percent of itself to avoid missing out on the Internet boom.

…

postal service had funded: “Mail Service Drops Facsimile System,” New York Times, March 8, 1961. newspapers including the: See the editorial sections of the aforementioned publications on July 7, 1980. Von Meister soon formed: Alec Klein, Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 14–16. with great fanfare: Ibid., 15–16. wildly popular Commodore 64: Ibid., 33. Quantum had nearly: Ibid., 35. service America Online: Ibid., 45. $30 million in: America Online Inc., Annual Report (Washington DC: Securities and Exchange Commission, 1996).

Circle of Greed: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Lawyer Who Brought Corporate America to Its Knees by Patrick Dillon, Carl M. Cannon

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, collective bargaining, Columbine, company town, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, desegregation, energy security, estate planning, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, illegal immigration, index fund, John Markoff, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, margin call, Maui Hawaii, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, Michael Milken, money market fund, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, power law, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, the High Line, the market place, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

a classic example of scheme liability: Markel and Ballard, “In re: Charter Communications (Stoneridge).” a similar set of facts: Gregory A. Markel and Gregory G. Ballard, “In re Charter Communications, Inc. Securities Litigation and Simpson v. AOL Time Warner Inc.: Circuits Split Over the Validity of ‘Scheme’ Liability Under Section 10(b),” Securities Regulation Law Journal, Winter 2006, p. 246. identifying the alleged chicanery: Vaughn Marshall, “Simpson v. AOL Time Warner: The SEC and the Definition of Primary Liability under Rule 10b-5,” The RacetotheBottom.org, June 6, 2007. how they might rebound: Jaclyn Jaeger, “‘Secondary Actor’ Lawsuit Hits Fever Pitch,” Compliance Week, June 26, 2007.

…

Then the other guy says, ‘Well if he makes $24 million, then I’ve got to make $30 million.’” The subject of the interview was corporate greed. In the summer of 2002—with a consolidated lawsuit under way against dozens of defendants connected to Enron, with others against AT&T, Global Crossing, Qwest, and AOL Time Warner, with still another lawsuit in the final draft taking aim at Martha Stewart, and with an eye on Halliburton and WorldCom—Lerach had proudly positioned himself as America’s greatest fighter of corporate corruption, even as the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles was investigating him for similarly motivated conduct.

…

Patti checked and learned that the two Barksdales were brothers. Was it something they could use to get Judge Barksdale off the case? He called Lerach to confer. Lerach told him that Milberg Weiss had sued Jim Barksdale and that he was a defendant in a current Lerach Coughlin lawsuit against AOL/Time Warner—Barksdale served on its board. After he hung up the phone, Lerach directed an associate, Eric Isaacson, to draft a motion calling for Barksdale’s recusal. Speed was essential, and Isaacson finished in two days. The motion reached the clerk’s office in New Orleans with little time to spare—but enough for Judge Barksdale to recognize that he had no choice but to step aside.

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy by Stephen Witt

4chan, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, autism spectrum disorder, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, cloud computing, collaborative economy, company town, crowdsourcing, Eben Moglen, game design, hype cycle, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, inventory management, iterative process, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, job automation, late fees, mental accounting, moral panic, operational security, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, security theater, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, software patent, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Tipper Gore, zero day

In January 2000, Morris’ old bosses at Time Warner announced a startling transaction: they would be selling their company—their whole company—to America Online, the company whose business model was to drown the earth in unsolicited junk mail CDs. In exchange for $164 billion of hyperinflated AOL stock, Time Warner would sell it all—the magazines, the cable stations, the music labels, all of it—to an upstart Internet service provider trading at 200 times earnings that even an unsophisticated technology observer like Morris could see was a total house of cards. It was the stupidest transaction in the history of organized capitalism.

…

Despite the impressive growth in its market share, it was all Universal could do to keep its sales numbers flat. Everywhere else there was carnage. Tower Records was hurtling toward bankruptcy. Sony’s Columbia imprint was still fighting a civil war against its own consumer electronics division. EMI was buried in debt. Bertelsmann was offering its music assets up for sale. And then there was AOL Time Warner. Morris’ old bosses were presiding over a titanic disaster; in April 2002 the company had announced a 54-billion-dollar loss, the largest in American history. Technically the loss had been a “goodwill impairment charge.” That was an accountant’s way of saying they’d paid too much for something—in this case, the absurdly overvalued America Online, purchased at the height of the dot-com boom.

…

“black redneck” Facebook comment left on a picture of Glover with the Quad Squad. charged with felony embezzlement Chaney Sims later pleaded guilty to possession of stolen property, a misdemeanor. CHAPTER 12 “a bunch of drunken sailors nursing a hangover” Frank Pellegrini, “What AOL Time Warner’s $54 Billion Loss Means,” Time, April 25, 2002. up to 40 gigabytes of storage The third-generation iPod, released April 2003. “people don’t know what they want until you show it to them” Andy Reinhardt, “Steve Jobs on Apple’s Resurgence: Not a One-Man Show,” BusinessWeek, May 12, 1998.

Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , business logic, c2.com, commoditize, Dennis Ritchie, General Magic , George Gilder, index card, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, Mitch Kapor, Multics, Network effects, new economy, off-by-one error, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, reality distortion field, Robert X Cringely, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, slashdot, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, thinkpad, VA Linux, web application

When Netscape released Mozilla as open source, it was because they saw an opportunity to lower the cost of developing the browser. So they could get the commodity benefits at a lower cost. Later, AOL/Time Warner acquired Netscape. The server software, which was supposed to be the beneficiary of commodity browsers, wasn't doing all that well, and was jettisoned. Now, why would AOL/Time Warner continue to invest anything in open source? AOL/Time Warner is an entertainment company. Entertainment companies are the complement of entertainment delivery platforms of all types, including web browsers. This giant conglomerate's strategic interest is to make entertainment delivery—web browsers—a commodity for which nobody can charge money.

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

AOL had revenues of $5.2 billion and had made $879 million over the previous year, one of the few Internet companies to make money. AOL was valued by the stock market at $163 billion. AOL bought Time Warner for $165 billion. At the press conference announcing the merger, overturning their respective traditional corporate cultures, Gerald Levin, Time Warner’s chairman, appeared in an open-necked shirt and khakis, while Steve Case, AOL chairman, was clad uncharacteristically in a suit and tie. Case would be the chairman of the combined entity. The stock’s new ticker symbol would be AOL. Time Warner shareholders got 45 percent of the new AOL Time Warner, despite being the more senior partner. Levin endorsed Internet stocks: “The new media stock valuations are real.”

…

British Aluminium was not worth it at that price.”19 The advice may have been poor but Warburg did not do poorly out of the transaction. Acquisitions became common as a new generation of more aggressive businessmen assumed power. In January 2000, Time Warner and AOL agreed to merge.20 Time Warner was a sprawling conglomerate with publishing, film, television, entertainment, and media interests. AOL, originally America Online, was a young Internet company synonymous with the catchy “You’ve got mail” campaign. Time Warner had $26 billion in revenues, $6 billion in cash flows, a large amount of debt, and was valued at $83.5 billion prior to the merger. AOL had revenues of $5.2 billion and had made $879 million over the previous year, one of the few Internet companies to make money.

…

Riding the Internet boom to perfection, building up the stock price to stratospheric levels, AOL’s shares were a currency to purchase real income and cash-producing assets. Stock prices no longer represented any real underlying business or earnings. It was monopoly money, convertible into something real if others believed in its value. In 2002, as the Internet bubble collapsed, AOL Time Warner took the largest writedown in corporate history, recording a loss of $54 billion. Old media managers reasserted control, forcing out Case and Levin. Rio Tinto was old economy, formed in 1873 when British investors purchased the eponymous copper, silver, and gold mine in Huelva, dating back thousands of years to Iberians, Tartessians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Visigoths, and Moors.

Hacking Capitalism by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Abraham Maslow, air gap, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Debian, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, Donald Davies, Eben Moglen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mitch Kapor, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, patent troll, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, profit motive, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, safety bicycle, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

Distributing censorship and surveillance to Internet Service Providers has one drawback, from the perspective of regulators, in that counterfeiters can hire the services of another company, or set up their own shop. But the options are declining fast since ownership over the network infrastructure is concentrated into ever fewer hands. After a number of mergers, ownership over the cables is for all practical purposes divided up between AT&T and AOL Time Warner. These giants can easily strangle access to a large part of the network and pass decrees down to smaller Internet Service Providers. No less detrimental is their intent to turn the Internet into an interactive cable TV set.49 The next generation of wires would realise this scenario by discriminating the traffic going upstream from the client (user) to the server, while giving priority to traffic going downstream (downloading of data) from server to client.

…

In WASTE the connections are established between a small circle of people who trust each other from the start and the communication, in most cases consisting of illegally copied files, is heavily encrypted. The law authorities have a very hard time to find out about the infringements taking place in the private network. In the short time that WASTE was made available by Nullsoft the code spread like wildfire in the FOSS community. The whereabouts of the application was put out of reach of AOL Time Warner. After that the plug was finally pulled on Nullsoft. The story about OpenNap, Gnutella and WASTE gives a flavour of what can happen when the means to write algorithms are dispersed among the proletariat. FOSS licenses works in a way similar to the architecture of Gnutella. By decentralising the running of the technology, Gnutella’s authors gave up their control over their creation.

…

Index Aestethic innovation 64, 68, 177 Adorno, Theodor 65, 70, 168, 191–192 Advanced Research Projects Agency, see ARPA Affluent society 99–101 Aglietta, Michel 59 Alienation 10, 156–159, 173, 182, 188, 190 Allopoietic 134–135 Altair 17 Althusser, Louis 77 Analytical Engine 3 Anti-production 120, 213 n.12 AOL Time Warner 89, 91, 125 Apache 24, 28, 38, 44 Apple 17 ARPA (advanced research projects agency) 13–15 AT&T (american telephone and telegraph) 13–15, 19, 23–24, 91, 116 Audience power 66, 68, 198 n.47, 204 n.40 Authorship 74, 78, 80–82, 112, 114, 125, 128–129, 138, 154, 160, 174, 206 n.9 Autonomous Marxism 6–7, 52, 55, 176, 194 n.18, 201 n.9 Autopoietic 134–135, 155 Axelos, Kostas 158–159 Babbage, Charles 3–4 Back Orifice 80 Barbrook, Richard 150, 216 n.27 Bataille, George 147, 149, 154, 216 n.20 Baudrillard, Jean 64, 103, 105, 109, 127, 202 n.19, 211 n.9, n.12 BBS (bulletin board systems) 96 Beauty of the Baud 3, 184 Bell, Daniel 51, 54, 100, 170–171, 173 Bell, Graham 11 Bell laboratory 14 Benjamin, Walter 65, 207 n.18, 210 n.49 Benkler, Yochai 139–140, Berkeley internet name domain, see BIND Berkeley software distribution, see BSD Berne convention 85, 208 n.25 Bertelsmann 124 Biegel, Stuart 91 Bijker, Wiebe 54–55, 203 n.24 Binary code 19, 21–22, 97, 195 n.16 BIND (Berkeley internet name domain) 25 Biometric technology 92–93 Black, Edwin 194 n.15 Boomerang externalities 146 Bowles, Samuel 173 Boyle, James 117, 208 n.24 Brand, Stewart 16, 69 Braverman, Harry 130–133 British cultural studies 9, 65–66 Brooks, Fred 184 BSD (Berkeley software distribution) 15, 23–24, 38 Bulletin board systems, see BBS Burghardt, Gordon 166–167 Bush, Vannevar 12 Caffentzis, George 61–63 Caillois, Roger 166–167, 182 Castells, Manuel 51, 145, 200 n.3, 202 n.19, 216 n.15 CC (Creative commons) 4, 41, 78 Censorship 4, 79–80, 82, 91, 97, 178, 189 CERN (Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire) 25 Certeau, Michel de 66, 112, 182 Chaos computer club 180 Charismatic code 153, 217 n.33 Chiapello, Eve 163 Circulating capital 120, 145 Class consciousness 18, 178, 180–181 for-itself 188 struggle 4, 7, 44, 47–48, 54, 56, 67, 72, 76, 103–104, 159, 175–178, 188, 203 n.20, 204 n.27, 212 n.12 Clickwrap license, see shrinkwrap license Coase, Ronald 140 Cohen, Gerald 54 Collective invention, 213 n.6 Collins, Hugh 76–77 Commodification of information 8, 31, 199 n.60, Commodity exchange theory 75–76, 90 Commons 119, 122, 129, 135, 137, 145–148, 150–151, 171–172, 184, 191, 199 n.57, 216 n.18 Community for-itself 183 FOSS developers 21, 23 Compiling 195 n.16 Computer literacy 131–132 Constant capital 127 Copyleft 20–22, 34, 196 n.19, n.21, 198 n.44 Copyright law 8, 18–22, 78–79, 82–85, 94, 98, 112, 113, 143, 154, 181, 195 n.14, 196 n.19, 207 n.15, 208 n.22 Crackers 69, 98, 113, 151, 153, 155, 183, 188, 217 n.35 Creative class 51, 61, 173–174 Creative commons, see CC Cross, Gary 101 Cultural workers 82, 163–164, 192 Culture industry 57, 70, 73, 75, 85, 106, 112, 168, 173, 205 n.46 Cyber attacks 199 n.61 feminism 30, 214 n.32 libertarianism 4, 90, 216 n.27 marx 52 politics 4, 30, 48, 69 space 11, 88, 150 Cycles of struggle 176–177 Cygnus 32–34 Darknet 97 Davies, Donald 195 n.5 Debian 123 Debian-women 30 Debord, Guy 103, 211 n.9 Decompiling 195 n.16 DeCSS see DVD-Jon Deleuze, Gilles 135, 213 n.12, 215 n.34 Denial-of-service attacks 1, 193 n.3 Derrida, Jacques 57, 149, 153, 216 n.24 Desire 18, 27, 48, 105, 109, 136, 155–156, 161, 174, 185–186 Deskilling 5, 9, 45, 97, 111, 130–131, 209 n.44, 210 n.56 Desktop factory 186 Developing countries and FOSS 30, 87, 96, 210 n.54 Difference Engine 3 Digital rigths management, see DRM DRM (digital rights management) 22, 42, 91, 183, 209 n.45 DVD-Jon 87–88, 91 Edelman, Bernard 77–78, 80, 207 n.16 Edwards, Richard 89 Electro-hippies 178 Electronic Frontier Foundation 58, 208 n.21 Ellickson, Robert 217 n.30 Empire 6 Enclosure movement 71, 129, 171 Engels, Friedrich 53, 115 Enzensberger, Hans 194 n.16, 210 n.49 Excess of expenditure 49, 100, 136, 147–148, 153–155, 171, 174 Exchange value 45, 56, 103–105, 109, 144, 211 n.12 Fan media production 112–113, 127, 164, 183, 191, 212 n.20, 194 n.16 Fanning, Shawn 124–125 Felsenstein, Lee 17 Filesharing networks 4, 8, 10, 31, 73, 93–94, 113, 127, 137, 150–153, 189 Firefox 37, Fisher, William 74–75 Fixed capital 15, 27, 39, 68 Flextronics 96 Florida, Richard 51, 173–174 Fordism 59, 67, 101, 203 n.26 Formal subsumption 56, 118 FOSS (free and open source) community 5, 8, 28–29, 38, 49, 111, 125, 133, 172, 177 development model 6, 9, 24, 41, 49, 115, 121, 137, 139–140, 190 license 8, 20, 28, 40, 78, 122, 125, 190 movement 26–27, 31–32, 38, 43, 50, 116, 133, 150, 184, 195 n.17 Foucault, Michel 48, 57, 76, 80, 128, 181 Frankel, Justin 124–125 Frankfurt School 57, 160 Free and open source software, see FOSS Freenet 80, 214 n.18, Free software foundation 19, 22–23, 37, 73, 126, 179–180, 196 n.20, n.23 movement 151, 195 n.17 Free speach not free beer 32, 73, 123 French regulation school 59, 204 n.27 French revolution 1–2, 79, 159, 161, 165, 187 Friedman, Andrew 133 Frow, John 151 Gaines, Jane 207 n.20 Garnham, Nicholas 102 Gates, Bill 4 Gay, Paul du 106–107 General economy 147 intellect 60, 63, 184 public license, see GPL Giddens, Anthony 200 n.6 Gift economy 10, 54, 100, 137, 148–152 Gintis, Herbert 173 Gnome 35, GNU (GNU is not Unix) book 210 n.55 Emacs 20, 32 /Linux 4, 15, 22–24, 26, 28, 31–35, 38–39, 43–44, 47, 87, 123, 163, 183, 196 n.23, n.28 Gnutella 124–125, 153, 214 n.18 Google 41 Gopher 25 Gosling, James 20 Gouldner, Alvin 201 n.12 GPL (General public license) 19–24, 27, 31–32, 34–35, 37, 96, 129, 185, 196 n.19, n.20, n.21, 197 n.44 Gracenote 41, 199 n.57 Guattari, Felix 135, 213 n.12, 215 n.34 Habermas, Jurgen 202 n.16 Hacker manifesto 28, 30, 172 spirit 44, 108, 174, 199 n.66 Hacktivists 16, 55, 84, 178, 180, 182 Haeksen 30, 197 n.41 Halloween Documents 26 Haraway, Donna 197 n.42 Hardin, Garrett 145–146, 148 Hardt, Michael 6, 47–48, 52, 60, 194 n.18, 204 n.30 Hardware hackers 7, 17–18, 96 Harrison, Bennett 140–141 Harvey, David 95 Haug, Wolfgang 104–105 Hayes, Dennis 44 Hayles, Katherine 71–72, 203 n.22 Hearn, Francis 168, 182 Heeles, Paul 108 Hegel, G.W.F. 52–53, 56, 74, 157 Heidegger, Martin 160 Heller, Michael 148 High-tech cottage industry 139 gift economy 10, 100, 137, 150 Himanen, Pekka 100, 108, 174, 199 n.66 Hippel, Eric von 205 n.44 Hirsch, Fred 102, 171 Hobsbawm, Eric 76, 189, 193 n.6 Holloway, John 7 Homebrew computer club 17, 185 Homo ludens 165 Horkheimer, Max 65, 70, 168 Howard, Michael 114–115 Huizinga, Johan 165–167, 182 Human genome project 39, 93 Hyde, Lewis 152, IBM 5, 7, 17–19, 24, 38, 43–44, 47, 73, 92, 108, 128, 142, 194 n.15 Identification 90–93, 189 Identity 98, 110, 123, 174–177, 181 Illich, Ivan 128, Immaterial labour 52, 60–61, 71 Independent media centre (IMC) 126 Information age 8, 19, 31, 50–54, 57, 60, 108, 180, 182, 199 n.66, 202 n.19, 203 n.26 exeptionalism 69–70, 73, 132, society 50 Instrumentality 10, 49, 56, 116, 160, Intel 17, 38–39, 43, 92, 198 n.52 Intellectual property enforcement 5, 43, 83, 85, 85, 88, 94, 98, 133 regime 19, 35, 42, 65, 72–75, 80, 82–85, 111, 113–114, 119, 123, 154, 174 Internet explorer 36–37 Jacquard Joseph-Marie 1, 3 Jacquard loom, 1, 193 n.1, n.2, n.4 Jameson, Fredric 56, 64, 201 n.8, 202 n.17 Jefferson, Thomas 69, 205 n.50 Jenkins, Henry 212 n.20 Jessop, Bob 143, 216 n.14 Johansen, Jon, see DVD-Jon Johnson-Forrest Tendency 143 Kant, Immanuel 74, 161 Kautsky, Karl 53–54 KDE (K desktop environment) 35 Kenney, Martin 39, 67 Keynesianism 143, 170 King, John 114–115 Kirchheimer Otto 77 Kloppenburg, Jack 90 Kopytoff, Igor 150 Kropotkin, Peter 129 Labour contract of the outlaw 123 Laclau, Ernesto 175 Lamer 58, 153, 155 Landsat system 119 Late capitalism 56, 101, 104, 120, 168, 188, 201 n.8, 202 n.17, n.18 Lazzarato, Maurizio 60–62 Lenin, Vladimir 4, 115 Lessig, Lawrence 70, 88 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 152, 217 n.34 Levy, Steven 17 Libertarianism 18, 34, 50, 90, 182, 196 n.28, 216 n.27 Library economy 136, 151–153, 155 Liebowitz, Stan 122–123, 144, Linux, see also GNU/Linux chix 30 kernel 21, 23, 49, 193 n.7, 196 n.23 Liu, Alan 48 Locke, John 74, 78, 147, 154 Luddites 1–2, 189 Lukács, Georg 162, 178–181, 184 Lury, Celia 81 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 201 n.10 Machlup, Fritz 69, 206 n.58 Magic circle 165, 167, 190 Make-believe markets 145–146, 148, 155 Mallet, Serge 60, 204 n.29 Malinowski, Bonislaw 148 Mandel, Ernest 56, 59–60, 62–63, 184, 202 n.17, n.18, n.19 Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company 116 Marcuse, Herbert 3, 10, 116, 159–164, 182, 184 Marx, Karl 2, 4, 7, 48, 50, 53–54, 56–57, 60–61, 64, 81, 88, 101, 104, 109–111, 114–115, 118–119, 133, 139, 141, 144–145, 156–162, 173–175, 197 n.32, 201 n.12, 211 n.5, 212 n.19, 215 n.4 Maslow, Abraham 99–101, 211 n.2 Mass worker 7, 176 Maturana, Humberto 134, 136s Mauss, Marcel 148–149 McBride, Darl 31, 87 McLuhan, Marshall 58 McRobbie, Angela 108 Means of production 9, 48, 57, 81, 116, 129–130, 135, 186, 192 Mentor, the 172 Micro-capital 141 Microsoft 4, 19, 24, 26, 34, 36–39, 42–43, 63, 87, 92, 96, 144 Mill, John Stuart 69 Minitel 14 Minix 23–24 Moglen, Eben 4, 126 Mokyr, Joel 55 Moody, Glen 35, 37, 130 Moore, Fred 17 Morris-Suzuki, Tessa 63–64 Mosaic 36, 198 n.50 Mosco, Vincent, 204 n.40 Motion pictures association of america, see MPAA Mouffe, Chantal 175 Mozilla 36–37, 198 n.50 Mozilla crypto group 126 MPAA (motion pictures association of america) 42, 87–88, 199 n.58, 209 n.36 Multitude 6–7, 60, 181 Mumford, Lewis 134, 147 Naples, Nancy 200 n.77 Napster 124–125, 213 n.17 Naughton, John 12, 15 N/C technology 45–46, 131 Negri, Antonio 6–7, 47–48, 52, 56–57, 60–61, 176–177, 194 n.18, 201 n.9, n.15, 202 n.16, 204 n.31, n.33 Neo-Luddism 134 Netscape 36–38, 126 Network externalities 38, 144 firm 137, 141–142, 144 industry 27, 137 science 141, 215 n.2 society 51, 137, 142 Neuman, Franz 77 Neumann, John von 61, 63 New economy 124, 132, 144 New left 16–17, 150–151, 157, 212 n.12 Noble, David 45, 131, 206 n.59 Norton, Bruce 202 n.17 Nullsoft 125 Nupedia 128 Oekonux 5 Offe, Claus 214 n.30 Office despotism 18 Opencores project 96 Open marxism 7 Open source car 185 development labs 43 initiative 36, 38–41, 78, 180 Organised labour 27, 41, 69, 72, 95–96, 131–132, 141–142, 188, 190 Pashukanis, Evgeny 75–77, 206 n.2 Patent costs 116–118 expansion 22, 39, 83–84, 208 n.24 pools 119 Peer-to-peer filesharing networks 31, 91, 123– 125, 151 labour relations 123, 129 Perelman, Michael 86, 171 Perpetual innovation economy 64, 120 Petty commodity trader 61, 81, 159 PGP (pretty good privacy) 80 Phone phreaks 16, 96–97 Pirate sharing 69, 122–123, 183, 209 n.33, n.45 Play drive 10, 18, 49, 154, 161–162 struggle 3, 10, 156, 174, 182, 190–192 Political subject 156, 174 Poster, Mark 128 Post- fordism 8, 59–61, 67, 81, 107, 116, 133, 135, 139–140, 163, 168, 176, 183, 203 n.26, 204 n.27 industrialism 5, 51–52, 54, 56, 60–61, 71, 100, 103, 130, 137, 139 marxism 175, 177 modern capitalism, 52, 56, 61, 64, 73, 101, 104, 120, 145, 168, 175–176, 188, 216 n.20 Poulantzas, Nicos 218 n.18 Pretty good privacy, see PGP Professional worker 176 Proprietary software 9, 16, 19, 21, 24, 26–27, 33–34, 38, 41, 115, 129–130, 139, 144, 198 n.46, n.52, 200 n.71 Prosumer 106–108 Put to work 8, 48, 73, 82, 177, 184 Qt 35 Radio amateur 17, 96, 185, 191 Radio frequency identifiers, see RFID RAND (research and development) 13 Rand, Ayn 206 n.61 Raymond, Eric 25–27, 196 n.28, 197 n.29 Real subsumption 56, 118, 135 Record industry association of america, see RIAA Recuperation 49, 164, 182 Red Hat 26, 32–35, 43, 47, 68, 196 n.27, 197 n.33, n.44, 198 n.45 Refusal of work 44, 108 Rehn, Alf 217 n.35 Representation politics 66, 110, 191 Research and development, see RAND Restrictive economy, see general economy RFID (radio frequency identifiers) 92 RIAA (record industry association of america) 42, 124–125, 153, 199 n.58 Robins, Kevin 194 n.17, 209 n.44 Romanticism 2, 81–82, 159, 162–163 Ross, Andrew 46, 199 n.66 Sabotage 1, 10, 46, 111, 188, 193 n.6 Sahlins, Marshall 70 Sanger, Larry 128 Sarnoff law 66 Scarcity 70–71, 99–101, 109, 112–113, 130, 147, 155, 160, 169, 190 Schiller, Dan 71, Schiller, Friedrich 23, 10, 154, 160–163, 184 Schumpeterian competition state 143 Schumpeter, Joseph 30 SCO/Caldera 43–44, 87 Self-administrated poverty 172 Sennett, Richard 45 SETI@home 127 Sham property 141 Shiva, Vandana 209 n.45 Shrinkwrap license 21 Shy, Oz 122, 143–144 Silicon Valley 44, 180 Simputer 210 n.54 Sitecom Germany GmbH 22 Situationists 150 Smythe, Dallas 66–67 Social bandit 76, 93–94, 98, 189 division of labour 4, 77, 99, 123, 149, 158–159, 164, 174, 187–188, 192, 205 n.44, 210 n.49 factory 47–48, 56, 64, 68, 89, 177 labour 38, 56, 71 planning theory 74–75 taylorism 90, 97–98, 209 n.44 worker 7, 60, 176–177 Sony 42 Stallman, Richard 19–20, 32, 37, 73, 179, 195 n.17, 196 n.23, 200 n.71 Strahilevitz, Jacob 152–153, 217 n.33 Stefik, Mark 92 Sterling, Bruce 11, 15 Strahilevitz, Jacob 152–153, 217 n.33 Surplus labour 8, 47–48, 61, 63, 67, 211 n.5 profit business model 34, 68 value 33–34, 47, 50, 61–64, 66–68, 101, 105, 110–111, 118, 120–121, 134, 156, 202 n.16, 204 n.40, 213 n.12, Surveillance 4–5, 85, 90–91, 97, 143, 145, 189, 214 n.18, Tanenbaum, Andrew 23 Taylorism 8, 45–46, 48, 90, 115, 132 Techies 16, 18, 30, 178, 182 Technical division of labour 27, 48, 115, 123, 132, 142, 155, 199 n.68 Technicist 54, 201 n.6 Technological american party 16, 18 Technological determinism 57–58, 182 Terranova, Tiziana 68 Toffler, Alvin 51, 106 Torvalds, Linus 21–23, 26–27, 49, 193 n.7, 197 n.32 Travis, Hannibal 207 n.15 TRIPS 86, 208 n.29 Troll Tech 35 Tronti, Mario 47 Trusted computing 92, 96 Unix 14–15, 19–20, 23–24, 43, 87, 195 n.7 User centred development 9, 27, 41, 65–68, 129, 131, 133, 192, 205 n.44 community 50, 68, 111, 123 friendliness 17, 45, 90, 98 Use value 68, 71, 101–105, 109, 113, 120, 122, 129, 144, 147, 153, 155, 211 n.9, n.12 Vaneigem Raoul 212 n.21 Varela, Francisco 134, 136 Variable capital 127 Veblen, Torsten 211 n.7 Villanueva, Edgar 144 Virno, Paulo 57, 73, 172, 177 Virtual community 152–153, 217 n.30 space 90, 92–93, 95, 184, 203 n.22, 217 n.33 Volosinov, Valentin 202 n.20 Voluntarism 5, 29, 179 Voluntary labour 2, 8, 107, 129, 166 Wales, Jimmy 128 Warez 153, 183, 217 n.35 Wark, McKenzie 177 W.a.s.t.e. 125 Watt, Duncan 141–142 Watt, James 166 Watt, Richard 213 n.14 Wayner, Peter 151–152 Webster, Frank 194 n.17, 200 n.3, 201 n.7, 209 n.44 Wetware 133–135 White collar working class 48, 97, 130, 200 n.72 hat hacking 180 Whole Earth Catalog 16 Wiener, Norbert 12 Wikipedia 128–129 Williams, Raymond 58 Windows 25, 41, 43, 86–87, 123, 126, 163, 183 Winner, Langdon 16, 203 n.25 WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation) 18, 83, 91 Wired Magazine 18, 58, 180 Witheford, Nick-Dyer 51, 204 n.31 Wolfgang, Haug 104–105 Wolf, Naomi 105 Wood, Stephen 131 Workfare state 135, 171 World Intellectual Property Organisation, see WIPO World Trade Organisation, see WTO Worshipful Company of Stationers London 79 Wright, Steve 201 n.9 WTO (World Trade Organisation) 86, 126, 178 Yahoo 41 Young, Robert 26–27, 33, 126, 196 n.27, 198 n.46, n.52 Youth international party line 16 Zero work 49 Zizek, Slavoj 4, 175

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

A few months after Palihapitiya joined the company, Winamp hit the jackpot, getting acquired by America Online for a deal worth close to $100 million. Six months after that, in January 2000, AOL bought media giant Time Warner in a jaw-dropping $165 billion deal that was a harbinger of the information society to come—one where tech companies became powerful platforms for news delivery and social interaction.3 The AOL-Time Warner octopus now encompassed everything from the instant-messaging services used by teenagers to the newsmagazines read by their parents to the granddaddy of all cable-news networks, CNN.

…

Now, instead of working for a scrappy start-up, Chamath Palihapitiya, the risk-seeking migrant with start-up fever, was working for one of the world’s largest media companies. But perhaps it was a lucky break. For within months of the AOL-Time Warner deal, the dot-com fever broke and Wall Street and venture investment abruptly stopped flowing into San Francisco’s feverish start-up scene. Without cash, all kinds of young companies—online delivery services, search engines, enterprise software companies—bit the dust. AOL’s stock price tumbled along with the rest, and the merger with Time Warner rapidly turned toxic. People were getting fired left and right, and Palihapitiya knew he couldn’t be one of them: leaving AOL would mean losing his visa.

…

Walter Mossberg, “Behind the Lawsuit: Napster Provides Model for Music Distribution,” The Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2000, C1. 3. Cyrus Farivar, “Winamp’s Woes: How the Greatest MP3 Player Undid Itself,” Ars Technica, July 3, 2017; “The Biggest Media Merger Yet,” The New York Times, January 11, 2000, A24. On the AOL Time Warner merger and its effects, see Kara Swisher with Lisa Dickey, There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003). CHAPTER 23: THE INTERNET IS YOU 1. Joint Venture Silicon Valley, 2002 Index (Palo Alto, Calif.: Joint Venture Silicon Valley, 2002); Gregory Zuckerman, “A Year After the Peak, How the Mighty Have Fallen,” The Wall Street Journal, March 5, 2001, C1; Scott Berinato, “What When Wrong at Cisco in 2001,” CIO Magazine 14, no. 20 (August 2001): 52–59. 2.

Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments by Michael Batnick

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Carl Icahn, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, global macro, hindsight bias, index fund, initial coin offering, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, multilevel marketing, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Pershing Square Capital Management, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, short squeeze, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Y Combinator

Shortly after the merger, Bogle was feeling pretty smart about their shrewd business decision. In a recent interview, he said, “The first five years you would have described Bogle as a genius. And at the end of the first 10 years, roughly, you would have said: the worst merger in history, including AOL and Time Warner. It all fell apart. Their management skills were zero. They ruined the fund they started, Ivest. They started two more and ruined both. And they ruined Wellington Fund.”10 Like so many other funds, Wellington got seduced and ultimately chewed up and spit out by the go‐go years of the 1960s: The term “go‐go” came to designate a method of operating in the stock market – a method that was, to be sure, free, fast, and lively, and certainly in some cases attended by joy, merriment and hubbub.

…

Index 13D registration, 90 101 Years on Wall Street (Brown), 50 Abbot Labs, 91 ABX Index, 134 Ackman, Bill, 3, 85, 88 CNN interview, 92 confidence, 88–89 persistence, 89 Adams, Evelyn, 131 Airbnb, 151 Alcoa, trading, 157 Alfond, Harold, 81 Amazon, 139–140 earnings, 7 Animal spirits, 126 “Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion, and Status Quo Bias” (Kahneman/Knetsch/Thaler), 75 AOL/Time Warner, merger, 49 Apple earnings, certainty (example), 120 shareholder wealth, 109 Arthur Lipper, tracking, 70 Art of Contrary Thinking, The, (Neill), 67 Assets under management (AUM), reduction, 61 Automatic, Sacca investment, 149 Bacon, Louis, 103 Balanced fund, transformation, 50 Bank of England, currency defense, 103 Bank of Taiwan, investments, 40 Baruch, Bernard, 7 Batnick, Michael, 155 Behavior gap, 99 Bell, Alexander Graham, 29 Benchmarks, 77 Benjamin Graham Joint Account, 7 Berkowitz, David, 88 Berkshire Hathaway Buffett control, 76 drawdowns, 143 market cap, 79 recovery, 114 shares, decline, 142 stock, Buffett purchase, 76 value loss, 57 Bernstein, Peter, 121, 164 Bernstein, William, 37 Betting on Zero (Silvan), 94 Betty Crocker, comparison, 91 Black Monday, 102 Black‐Scholes option pricing model, 39–40 Blood money, 91 Blue Chip Stamps, 141–142 Bogle, Jack, 45, 159 firing (Wellington Management), 51 impact, 47 performance, problems, 51 Boston Security Analysis Society, Samuelson remarks, 51 Brokerage house, offer, 20 Brokers, long‐term relationship, 61 Brooks, John, 68 Brown, John Dennis, 50 Brown, Josh, 162–163 Bucket shops closure, 18 usage, 16 Buffalo Evening News (purchase), 142 Buffett, Warren, 4, 10, 73, 140 annual forecasts, 77 circle of competence, 80 comparison, 100 gross returns, 76 investment philosophy, 76–77 limited partnership, closure, 111 Oracle of Omaha, 76, 78 Pearson, contrast, 114 Bull market, margin for error, 67 Cabot, Walter, 50 Capital, usage, 17 Carr, Fred, 69 Cayne, James, 40 Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor (Griffin), 81 Charmin, comparison, 91 Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) exam, 158–159 Chasing the Last Laugh (Zacks), 27 Chesapeake & Atlantic, 20–21 Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, 16 Chicago Herald (problems), 30 Church and Dwight, value, 91 Churchill, Winston, 91 Circle of competence (Buffett), 80 Cisco, gains, 57 Citron Research, 113–114 Clemens, Samuel.

The Global Minotaur by Yanis Varoufakis, Paul Mason

active measures, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Easter island, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, planetary scale, post-oil, price stability, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, systematic trading, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

The valuations were nothing more than bubbles waiting to burst. And burst they did, just before the Crash of 2008. In 2007, DaimlerChrysler broke up and Daimler sold Chrysler for a sad $500 million (taking a ‘haircut’ of $35.5 billion on the price it had paid in 1998, lost interest not included). It was a similar story with AOL-Time Warner: by 2007, its Wall Street capitalization had been revised down from $350 billion to $29 billion, and the break-up left both companies reeling. On the other side of the Atlantic, in the other Anglo-Celtic economy that the Europeans had so much admired before 2008, a similar game was unfolding in the City of London.

…

ABN-Amro, takeover by RBS, 119–20 ACE (aeronautic–computer–electronics) complex, 83 Acheson, Dean, 68 Adenauer, Konrad, 74 Afghanistan, proposed US invasion, 106–7 Africa: colonization, 79; investment in, 214, 218, 252, 253 agriculture, 26, 31 AIG (American Insurance Group), 150, 153, 159 Akins, James, 97 Allied Control Council, 70 America see US (United States) American Civil War, 40 Anglo-Celtic model, 12–13, 23, 117, 199 Anglo-Celtic societies, 20, 128–9 Anglo Irish Bank, 158 Angola, effect of China on, 214–15 AOL-Time Warner, 117 apartheid, in the US, 84 aporia, 1, 3–4, 25, 33, 146 Argentina: Crash of 2008, 163; currency unions, 61, 65; effect of China on, 215, 218; financial crisis, 190; trade with Asia, 215 asabiyyah (solidarity), 33–4 Asia: investment in, 191, 215; investors from, 175; reaction to the Crash of 2008, 13; surplus output, 184; US-controlled, 78 see also East Asia; South East Asia; specific countries ATMs (automated telling machines): virtual, 8, 9; Volcker on, 122 Australia: effect of China on, 214; house prices, 128, 129, 129; Reserve Bank, 160 balance, global, 22 Bank of America, 153, 157, 158 Bank of Canada, 148, 155 Bank of Denmark, 157 Bank of England: and Barings Bank, 40; and the Crash of 2008, 151, 155, 156, 158; and Northern Rock, 148; rates, 148, 159 Bank of Japan, 148, 187, 189 Bank of Sweden, 157 bankruptocracy, 164–8, 169, 191, 230, 236, 237, 250 banks: bonuses, 8; and the EFSF, 175; main principle of, 130; nationalization, 153, 154, 155, 158; Roosevelt’s regulations, 10; runs on, 148; zombie, 190–1 see also specific banks Barclays Bank, 151, 152 Barings Bank, 40 bauxite, prices, 96 Bear Stearns, 147, 151 Belgium, 75, 79, 120, 154, 196 Berlin crisis, 71 Berlin Wall, demolition, 201 Bernanke, Ben, 147, 148, 164, 230, 231, 233, 234 Big Bang, 138 bio-fuels, 163 biological weapons, 27 Black Monday, 2, 10 Blake, William, 29 BNP-Paribas, 147–8 boom to bust cycle, 35 Bradford and Bingley, 154 Brazil: Crash of 2008, 163; effect of China on, 215, 217, 218, 253; trade with Asia, 215 Bretton Woods conference, 58–61, 62, 64, 254–5 Bretton Woods system, 60, 62, 63, 67, 78, 92–3; end, 94, 95–6 Britain: Crash of 2008, 2, 159; crisis of 1847, 40; devaluing of the pound, 93; economy under Thatcher, 136–7; Global Plan, 69; gold request, 94; Gold Standard, 44; Icelandic bank nationalization, 155; labour costs, 105; Plaza Accord, 188; stance on Cyprus, 79; stance on India, 79; unemployment rate, 160 British Academy, 4, 5, 6 Buffet, Warren, 8 bureaucracies, rise of, 27 Bush, George W., 149, 156, 157 Byrnes, James, 68 capital, and the human will, 18–19 capitalism: dynamic system, 139–40; free market, 68; generation of crises, 34; global, 58, 72, 114, 115, 133; Greenspan and, 11–12; Marxism, 17–18; static system, 139; supposed cure for poverty, 41–2; surplus recycling mechanisms, 64–5 capitalists, origin of, 31 car production, 70, 103, 116, 157–8 carry trade, 189–90 Carter, Jimmy, 99, 100 CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), 141–2, 147–8, 149, 150, 153; for crops, 163; eurozone, 205; explanation, 6–9; France, 203; function, 130–2; Greece, 206 see also EFSF; Geithner–Summers Plan CDSs (credit default swaps), 149, 150, 153, 154, 176, 177 CEOs (chief executive officers), 46, 48, 49 Chamber of Commerce, British, 152 cheapness, ideology of, 124 Chiang Kai-shek, 76 Chicago Commodities Exchange, 120 Chicago Futures Exchange, 163 China: aggregate demand, 245; Crash of 2008, 156, 162; currency, 194, 213, 214, 217, 218, 252; economic development, 106–7; effects of the Crash of 2008, 3; financial support for the US, 216; global capital, 116; Global Plan, 76; growth, 92; rise and impact, 212–18, 219–20 Chrysler, 117, 159 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 69 Citigroup, 149, 156, 158 City of London: Anglo-Celtic model, 12; Crash of 2008, 148, 152; debt in relation to GDP, 4–5; financialization, 118–19; under Thatcher, 138; wealth of merchants, 28 civilization, 27, 29–30, 128 Clinton, Hillary, 212, 215–16 Cold War, 71, 80, 81, 86 collateralized debt obligations see CDOs commodification: resistance to, 53–4; rise of, 30, 33, 54; of seeds, 175 commodities: global, 27–8; human nature not, 53; labour as, 45, 49, 54; money as, 45, 49; prices, 96, 98, 102, 125; trading, 31, 175 common market, European, 195 communism, collapse of, 22, 107–8 complexity, and economic models, 139–40 Condorcet, Nicholas de Caritat, marquis de, 29, 32 Congress (US): bail-outs, 77, 153–4, 155; import tariff bill, 45 Connally, John, 94–5 council houses, selling off, 137, 138 Crash of 1907, 40 Crash of 1929, 38–43, 44, 181 Crash of 2008, 146–68; aftermath, 158–60; chronicle, 2007, 147–9; chronicle, 2008, 149, 151–8; credit default swaps, 150; effects, 2–3; epilogue, 164–8; explanations, 4–19; in Italy, 237; review, 160–4; in Spain, 237; warnings, 144–5 credit crunch, 149, 151 credit default swaps (CDSs), 149, 150, 153, 154, 176, 177 credit facilities, 127–8 credit rating agencies, 6–7, 8, 9, 20, 130 crises: as laboratories of the future, 28; nature of, 141; pre-1929, 40; pre-2008, 2; proneness to, 30; redemptive, 33–5, 35 currency unions, 60–1, 61–2, 65, 251 Cyprus, Britain’s role in, 69, 79 Daimler-Benz, 117 DaimlerChrysler, 117 Darling, Alistair, 159 Darwinian process, 167 Das Kapital (Marx), 49 de Gaulle, Charles, 76, 93 Debenhams, takeover of, 119 debt: and GDP, 4–5; unsecured, 128; US government, 92; US households, 161–2 see also CDOs; leverage debt–deflation cycle, 63 deficits: in the EU, 196; US budget, 22–3, 25, 112, 136, 182–3, 215–16; US trade, 22–3, 25, 111, 182–3, 196, 227 Deng Xiao Ping, 92, 212 Depressions: US 1873–8, 40; US Great Depression, 55, 58, 59, 80 deregulations, 138, 143, 170 derivatives, 120, 131–2, 174, 178 Deutschmark, 74, 96, 195, 197 Dexia, 154 distribution, and production, 30, 31, 54, 64 dollar: devaluing, 188; flooding markets, 92–3; pegging, 190; reliance on, 57, 60, 102; value of, 96, 204; zone, 62, 78, 89, 164 dotcom bubble, 2, 5 Draghi, Mario, 239 East Asia, 79, 143, 144, 194 see also Asia; specific countries East Germany, 201, 202 see also Germany Eastern Europe, 108, 198, 203 ECB (European Central Bank): aftermath of Crash of 2008, 158; bank bail-outs, 203, 204; Crash of 2008, 148, 149, 155, 156, 157; European banking crisis, 208, 209–10; Greek crisis, 207; LTRO, 238; Maastricht Treaty, 199–200; toxic theory, 15 economic models, 139–42 Economic Recovery Advisory Board (ERAB), 180, 181 Economic Report of the President (1999), 116 ECSC (European Coal and Steel Community), 74, 75–6 Edison, Thomas, 38–9 Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), 15 EFSF (European Financial Stability Facility), 174, 175–7, 207, 208–9 EIB (European Investment Bank), 210 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 82 Elizabeth II, Queen, 4, 5 ERAB (Economic Recovery Advisory Board), 180, 181 ERM (European Exchange Rate Mechanism), 197 EU (European Union): economies within, 196; EFSF, 174; European Financial Stability Mechanism, 174; financial support for the US, 216; origins, 73, 74, 75; SPV, 174 euro see eurozone eurobonds, toxic, 175–7 Europa myth, 201 Europe: aftermath of Crash of 2008, 162; bank bail-outs, 203–5; Crash of 2008, 2–3, 12–13, 183; end of Bretton Woods system, 95; eurozone problems, 165; Geithner–Summers Plan, 174–7; oil price rises, 98; unemployment, 164 see also specific countries European Central Bank see ECB European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), 74, 75–6 European Commission, 157, 203, 204 European Common Market, 195 European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), 197 European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), 174, 207, 208–9 European Financial Stability Mechanism, 174, 175–7 European Investment Bank (EIB), 210 European Recovery Progam see Marshall Plan European Union see EU eurozone, 61, 62, 156, 164; crisis, 165, 174, 204, 208–9, 209–11; European banks’ exposure to, 203; formation of, 198, 202; France and, 198; Germany and, 198–201; and Greek crisis, 207 exchange rate system, Bretton Woods, 60, 63, 67 falsifiability, empirical test of, 221 Fannie Mae, 152, 166 Fed, the (Federal Reserve): aftermath of Crash of 2008, 159; Crash of 2008, 148, 149, 151, 153, 155, 156, 157; creation, 40; current problems, 164; Geithner–Summers Plan, 171–2, 173, 230; Greenspan and, 3, 10; interest rate policy, 99; sub-prime crisis, 147, 149; and toxic theory, 15 feudalism, 30, 31, 64 Fiat, 159 finance: as a pillar of industry, 31; role of, 35–8 Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, 166 financialization, 30, 190, 222 First World War, Gold Standard suspension, 44 food: markets, 215; prices, 163 Ford, Henry, 39 formalist economic model, 139–40 Forrestal, James, 68 Fortis, 153 franc, value against dollar, 96 France: aid for banks, 157; colonialism criticized, 79; EU membership, 196; and the euro, 198; gold request, 94; Plaza Accord, 188; reindustrialization of Germany, 74; support for Dexia, 154 Freddie Mac, 152, 166 free market fundamentalism, 181, 182 French Revolution, 29 G7 group, 151 G20 group, 159, 163–4 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 73 GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), 78 GDP (Gross Domestic Product): Britain, 4–5, 88, 158; eurozone, 199, 204; France, 88; Germany, 88, 88; Japan, 88, 88; US, 4, 72, 73, 87, 88, 88, 161; world, 88 Geithner–Summers Plan, 159, 169–83; in Europe, 174–7; results, 178–81; in the US, 169–74, 170, 230 Geithner, Timothy, 170, 173, 230 General Motors (GM), 131–2, 157–8, 160 General Theory (Keynes), 37 geopolitical power, 106–8 Germany: aftermath of the Second World War, 68, 73–4; competition with US, 98, 103; current importance, 251; and Europe, 195–8; and the eurozone, 198–201, 211; global capital, 115–16; Global Plan, 69, 70; Greek crisis, 206; house prices, 129; Marshall Plan, 73; reunification, 201–3; support for Hypo Real Estate, 155; trade surplus, 251; trade surpluses, 158 Giscard d’Estaing, Valery, 93 Glass–Steagall Act (1933), 10, 180 global balance, 22 global imbalances, 251–2 Global Plan: appraisal, 85–9; architects, 68; end of, 100–1, 182; geopolitical ideology, 79–82; Germany, 75; Marshall Plan, 74; origins, 67–71; real GDP per capita, 87; unravelling of, 90–4; US domestic policies, 82–5 global surplus recycing mechanism see GSRM global warming, 163 globalization, 12, 28, 125 GM (General Motors), 131–2, 157–8, 160 gold: prices, 96; rushes, 40; US reserves, 92–3 Gold Exchange Standard, collapse, 43–5 Goodwin, Richard, 34 Great Depression, 55, 58, 59, 80 Greece: currency, 205; debt crisis, 206–8 greed, Crash of 2008, 9–12 Greek Civil War, 71, 72, 79 Greenspan, Alan, 3, 10–11 Greenwald, Robert, 125–6 Gross Domestic Product see GDP GSRM (global surplus recycling mechanism), 62, 66, 85, 90, 109–10, 222, 223, 224, 248, 252–6 HBOS, 153, 156 Heath, Edward, 94 hedge funds, 147, 204; LTCM, 2, 13; toxic theory, 15 hedging, 120–1 history: consent as driving force, 29; Marx on, 178; as undemocratic, 28 Ho Chi Minh, 92 Holland, 79, 120, 155, 196, 204 home ownership, 12, 127–8; reposessions, 161 Homeownership Preservation Foundation, 161 Hoover, Herbert, 42–3, 44–5, 230 House Committee on Un-American Activities, 73 house prices, 12, 128–9, 129, 138; falling, 151, 152 human nature, 10, 11–12 humanity, in the workforce, 50–2, 54 Hypo Real Estate, 155 Ibn Khaldun, 33 IBRD (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) see World Bank Iceland, 154, 155, 156, 203 ICU (International Currency Union) proposal, 60–1, 66, 90, 251 IMF (International Monetary Fund): burst bubbles, 190; cost of the credit crunch, 151; Crash of 2008, 155–6, 156, 159; demise of social services, 163; on economic growth, 159; European banking crisis, 208; G20 support for, 163–4; Greek crisis, 207; origins, 59; South East Asia, 192, 193; Third World debt crisis, 108; as a transnational institution, 253, 254 income: distribution, 64; national, 42; US national, 43 India: Britain’s stance criticized, 79; Crash of 2008, 163; suicides of farmers, 163 Indochina, and colonization, 79 Indonesia, 79, 191 industrialization: Britain, 5; Germany, 74–5; Japan, 89, 185–6; roots of, 27–8; South East Asia, 86 infinite regress, 47 interest rates: CDOs, 7; post-Global Plan, 99; prophecy paradox, 48; rises in, 107 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) see World Bank International Currency Union (ICU) proposal, 60–1, 66, 90, 253 International Labour Organisation, 159 International Monetary Fund see IMF Iran, Shah of, 97 Ireland: bankruptcy, 154, 156; EFSF, 175; nationalization of Anglo Irish Bank, 158 Irwin, John, 97 Japan: aftermath of the Second World War, 68–9; competition with the US, 98, 103; in decline, 186–91; end of Bretton Woods system, 95; financial support for the US, 216; global capital, 115–16; Global Plan, 69, 70, 76–8, 85–6; house prices, 129; labour costs, 105; new Marshall Plan, 77; Plaza Accord, 188; post-war, 185–91; post-war growth, 185–6; relations with the US, 187–8, 189; South East Asia, 91, 191–2; trade surpluses, 158 joblessness see unemployment Johnson, Lyndon B.: Great Society programmes, 83, 84, 92; Vietnam War, 92 JPMorgan Chase, 151, 153 keiretsu system, Japan, 186, 187, 188, 189, 191 Kennan, George, 68, 71 Kennedy, John F., New Frontier social programmes, 83, 84 Keynes, John Maynard: Bretton Woods conference, 59, 60, 62, 109; General Theory, 37; ICU proposal, 60, 66, 90, 109, 254, 255; influence on New Dealers, 81; on investment decisions, 48; on liquidity, 160–1; trade imbalances, 62–6 Keynsianism, 157 Kim Il Sung, 77 Kissinger, Henry, 94, 98, 106 Kohl, Helmut, 201 Korea, 91, 191, 192 Korean War, 77, 86 labour: as a commodity, 28; costs, 104–5, 104, 105, 106, 137; hired, 31, 45, 46, 53, 64; scarcity of, 34–5; value of, 50–2 labour markets, 12, 202 Labour Party (British), 69 labourers, 32 land: as a commodity, 28; enclosure, 64 Landesbanken, 203 Latin America: effect of China on, 215, 218; European banks’ exposure to, 203; financial crisis, 190 see also specific countries lead, prices, 96 Lebensraum, 67 Left-Right divide, 167 Lehman Brothers, 150, 152–3 leverage, 121–2 leveraging, 37 Liberal Democratic Party (Japan), 187 liberation movements, 79, 107 LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate), 148 liquidity traps, 157, 190 Lloyds TSB, 153, 156 loans: and CDOs, 7–8, 129–31; defaults on, 37 London School of Economics, 4, 66 Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) hedge fund collapse, 13 LTCM (Long-Term Capital Management) hedge fund collapse, 2, 13 Luxembourg, support for Dexia, 154 Maastricht Treaty, 199–200, 202 MacArthur, Douglas, 70–1, 76, 77 machines, and humans, 50–2 Malaysia, 91, 191 Mao, Chairman, 76, 86, 91 Maresca, John, 106–7 Marjolin, Robert, 73 Marshall, George, 72 Marshall Plan, 71–4 Marx, Karl: and capitalism, 17–18, 19, 34; Das Kapital, 49; on history, 178 Marxism, 181, 182 Matrix, The (film), 50–2 MBIA, 149, 150 McCarthy, Senator Joseph, 73 mercantilism, in Germany, 251 merchant class, 27–8 Merkel, Angela, 158, 206 Merrill Lynch, 149, 153, 157 Merton, Robert, 13 Mexico: effect of China on, 214; peso crisis, 190 Middle East, oil, 69 MIE (military-industrial establishment), 82–3 migration, Crash of 2008, 3 military-industrial complex mechanism, 65, 81, 182 Ministry for International Trade and Industry (Japan), 78 Ministry of Finance (Japan), 187 Minotaur legend, 24–5, 25 Minsky, Hyman, 37 money markets, 45–6, 53, 153 moneylenders, 31, 32 mortgage backed securities (MBS) 232, 233, 234 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), 214 National Bureau of Economic Research (US), 157 National Economic Council (US), 3 national income see GDP National Security Council (US), 94 National Security Study Memorandum 200 (US), 106 nationalization: Anglo Irish Bank, 158; Bradford and Bingley, 154; Fortis, 153; Geithner–Summers Plan, 179; General Motors, 160; Icelandic banks, 154, 155; Northern Rock, 151 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 76, 253 negative engineering, 110 negative equity 234 neoliberalism, 139, 142; and greed, 10 New Century Financial, 147 New Deal: beginnings, 45; Bretton Woods conference, 57–9; China, 76; Global Plan, 67–71, 68; Japan, 77; President Kennedy, 84; support for the Deutschmark, 74; transfer union, 65 New Dealers: corporate power, 81; criticism of European colonizers, 79 ‘new economy’, 5–6 New York stock exchange, 40, 158 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 19 Nixon, Richard, 94, 95–6 Nobel Prize for Economics, 13 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 214 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 76 North Korea see Korea Northern Rock, 148, 151 Obama administration, 164, 178 Obama, Barack, 158, 159, 169, 180, 230, 231 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), 73 OEEC (Organisation for European Economic Co-operation), 73, 74 oil: global consumption, 160; imports, 102–3; prices, 96, 97–9 OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), 96, 97 paradox of success, 249 parallax challenge, 20–1 Paulson, Henry, 152, 154, 170 Paulson Plan, 154, 173 Penn Bank, 40 Pentagon, the, 73 Plaza Accord (1985), 188, 192, 213 Pompidou, Georges, 94, 95–6 pound sterling, devaluing, 93 poverty: capitalism as a supposed cure for, 41–2; in China, 162; reduction in the US, 84; reports on global, 125 predatory governance, 181 prey–predator dynamic, 33–5 prices, flexible, 40–1 private money, 147, 177; Geithner–Summers Plan, 178; toxic, 132–3, 136, 179 privatization, of surpluses, 29 probability, estimating, 13–14 production: cars, 70, 103, 116, 157–8; coal, 73, 75; costs, 96, 104; cuts in, 41; in Japan, 185–6; processes, 30, 31, 64; steel, 70, 75 production–distribution cycle, 54 property see real estate prophecy paradox, 46, 47, 53 psychology, mass, 14 public debt crisis, 205 quantitative easing, 164, 231–6 railway bubbles, 40 Rational Expectations Hypothesis (REH), 15–16 RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland), 6, 151, 156; takeover of ABN-Amro, 119–20 Reagan, Ronald, 10, 99, 133–5, 182–3 Real Business Cycle Theory (RBCT), 15, 16–17 real estate, bubbles, 8–9, 188, 190, 192–3 reason, deferring to expectation, 47 recession predictions, 152 recessions, US, 40, 157 recycling mechanisms, 200 regulation, of banking system, 10, 122 relabelling, 14 religion, organized, 27 renminbi (RMB), 213, 214, 217, 218, 253 rentiers, 165, 187, 188 representative agents, 140 Reserve Bank of Australia, 148 reserve currency status, 101–2 risk: capitalists and, 31; riskless, 5, 6–9, 14 Roach, Stephen, 145 Robbins, Lionel, 66 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 165; attitude towards Britain, 69; and bank regulation, 10; New Deal, 45, 58–9 Roosevelt, Theodore (‘Teddy’), 180 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), 6, 151, 156; takeover of ABN-Amro, 119–20 Rudd, Kevin, 212 Russia, financial crisis, 190 Saudi Arabia, oil prices, 98 Scandinavia, Gold Standard, 44 Scholes, Myron, 13 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 19 Schuman, Robert, 75 Schumpter, Joseph, 34 Second World War, 45, 55–6; aftermath, 87–8; effect on the US, 57–8 seeds, commodification of, 163 shares, in privatized companies, 137, 138 silver, prices, 96 simulated markets, 170 simulated prices, 170 Singapore, 91 single currencies, ICU, 60–1 slave trade, 28 SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises), 186 social welfare, 12 solidarity (asabiyyah), 33–4 South East Asia, 91; financial crisis, 190, 191–5, 213; industrialization, 86, 87 South Korea see Korea sovereign debt crisis, 205 Soviet Union: Africa, 79; disintegration, 201; Marshall Plan, 72–3; Marxism, 181, 182; relations with the US, 71 SPV (Special Purpose Vehicle), 174 see also EFSF stagflation, 97 stagnation, 37 Stalin, Joseph, 72–3 steel production, in Germany, 70 Strauss-Kahn, Dominique, 60, 254, 255 Summers, Larry, 230 strikes, 40 sub-prime mortgages, 2, 5, 6, 130–1, 147, 149, 151, 166 success, paradox of, 33–5, 53 Suez Canal trauma, 69 Suharto, President of Indonesia, 97 Summers, Larry, 3, 132, 170, 173, 180 see also Geithner–Summers Plan supply and demand, 11 surpluses: under capitalism, 31–2; currency unions, 61; under feudalism, 30; generation in the EU, 196; manufacturing, 30; origin of, 26–7; privatization of, 29; recycling mechanisms, 64–5, 109–10 Sweden, Crash of 2008, 155 Sweezy, Paul, 73 Switzerland: Crash of 2008, 155; UBS, 148–9, 151 systemic failure, Crash of 2008, 17–19 Taiwan, 191, 192 Tea Party (US), 162, 230, 231, 281 technology, and globalization, 28 Thailand, 91 Thatcher, Margaret, 117–18, 136–7 Third World: Crash of 2008, 162; debt crisis, 108, 219; interest rate rises, 108; mineral wealth, 106; production of goods for Walmart, 125 tiger economies, 87 see also South East Asia Tillman Act (1907), 180 time, and economic models, 139–40 Time Warner, 117 tin, prices, 96 toxic theory, 13–17, 115, 133–9, 139–42 trade: balance of, 61, 62, 64–5; deficits (US), 111, 243; global, 27, 90; surpluses, 158 trades unions, 124, 137, 202 transfer unions, New Deal, 65 Treasury Bills (US), 7 Treaty of Rome, 237 Treaty of Versailles, 237 Treaty of Westphalia, 237 trickle-down, 115, 135 trickle-up, 135 Truman Doctrine, 71, 71–2, 77 Truman, Harry, 73 tsunami, effects of, 194 UBS, 148–9, 151 Ukraine, and the Crash of 2008, 156 UN Security Council, 253 unemployment: Britain, 160; Global Plan, 96–7; rate of, 14; US, 152, 158, 164 United States see US Unocal, 106 US economy, twin deficits, 22–3, 25 US government, and South East Asia, 192 US Mortgage Bankers Association, 161 US Supreme Court, 180 US Treasury, 153–4, 156, 157, 159; aftermath of the Crash of 2008, 160; Geithner–Summers Plan, 171–2, 173; bonds, 227 US Treasury Bills, 109 US (United States): aftermath of the Crash of 2008, 161–2; assets owned by foreign state institutions, 216; attitude towards oil price rises, 97–8; China, 213–14; corporate bond purchases, 228; as a creditor nation, 57; domestic policies during the Global Plan, 82–5; economy at present, 184; economy praised, 113–14; effects of the Crash of 2008, 2, 183; foreign-owned assets, 225; Greek Civil War, 71; labour costs, 105; Plaza Accord, 188; profit rates, 106; proposed invasion of Afghanistan, 106–7; role in the ECSC, 75; South East Asia, 192 value, costing, 50–1 VAT, reduced, 156 Venezuela, oil prices, 97 Vietnamese War, 86, 91–2 vital spaces, 192, 195, 196 Volcker, Paul: 2009 address to Wall Street, 122; demand for dollars, 102; and gold convertibility, 94; interest rate rises, 99; replaced by Greenspan, 10; warning of the Crash of 2008, 144–5; on the world economy, 22, 100–1, 139 Volcker Rule, 180–1 Wachowski, Larry and Andy, 50 wage share, 34–5 wages: British workers, 137; Japanese workers, 185; productivity, 104; prophecy paradox, 48; US workers, 124, 161 Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (documentary, Greenwald), 125–6 Wall Street: Anglo-Celtic model, 12; Crash of 2008, 11–12, 152; current importance, 251; Geithner–Summers Plan, 178; global profits, 23; misplaced confidence in, 41; private money, 136; profiting from sub-prime mortgages, 131; takeovers and mergers, 115–17, 115, 118–19; toxic theory, 15 Wallace, Harry, 72–3 Walmart, 115, 123–7, 126; current importance, 251 War of the Currents, 39 Washington Mutual, 153 weapons of mass destruction, 27 West Germany: labour costs, 105; Plaza Accord, 188 Westinghouse, George, 39 White, Harry Dexter, 59, 70, 109 Wikileaks, 212 wool, as a global commodity, 28 working class: in Britain, 136; development of, 28 working conditions, at Walmart, 124–5 World Bank, 253; origins, 59; recession prediction, 149; and South East Asia, 192 World Trade Organization, 78, 215 written word, 27 yen, value against dollar, 96, 188, 193–4 Yom Kippur War, 96 zombie banks, 190–1

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away by Doug Henwood

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital divide, electricity market, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, feminist movement, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, government statistician, greed is good, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Mary Meeker, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, occupational segregation, PalmPilot, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, union organizing, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Amidst a vast speedup of 230 Conclusion the social factory's assembly line, it evoked fantasies of abundance. And amidst aggressive attempts to privatize information, tighten up intellectual property restrictions, and put a meter on almost everything but the air, it stoked hopes for global Hnkages."Information wants to be free," the saying goes, but not as long as AOL Time Warner has its say. But why did The System's pubhcists need the Utopian story? If all challenges to capitaHsm were dead, why did we hear so much about democratization and the overturning of hierarchy? Evidently the message has appeal, even in apparently conservative times. Fine. If a Uttle hierarchy-overturning economic democratization is such a good thing, then why not more?

…

"Debtor Nation: Borrowing Levels Reach a Record, Sparking Debate," Wall Street Journal, ]u1y 5, p. CI. Aaron, David, 160 accounting. New Era, 17—22 Allen, Woody, 75 Aim, Richard, 114 Amazon.com, 30—31 Americanization of global finance, 217-225 Americans with Disabilities Act, 101 analysts, stock, 194-200 anriglobalization movement, 160,178,180, 229 AOL Time Warner, 229 Asian financial crisis (1997), 222, 225 Atwater, Wilbur, 107 AT Kearney, 153 Avalon, Frankie, 198 Badgett,M.V. Lee, 100 Balboa, Rocky, 198 Balibar, Etienne, 172-173, 239 bankruptcy, not in economists' models, 193 Barlow, Maude, 162 Bartiromo, Maria, 189-190 Baudrillard,Jean, 26 Becker, Gary, 94, 97 BeUo,Walden, 185 benefits, targeting of, 141-142 Berle,Adolph,212,213 bibhometrics "globahzarion," 145—146 "New Economy," 4 biotechnology, pubUc subsidy, 6 Biotic Baking Brigade, 239 birth weight, 81 Blodget, Henry, 195 Boesky, Ivan, 214 Bono, 177 book value, 232 border cultures, 172 Brady bonds, 221 brands, 17,18-19 Brand DNA, 18 Bretton Woods, 219 brokers productivity of, 64-66 salaries, 202 Brown & Co., 187 Buchanan, Pat, 151,173, 239 Burbach, Roger, 175 business, trust in, 32 Business Week cheerleading 1960s, 7-8 1990s, 32 New Economy poll, 31—32 California electricity crisis, 34,200 Silicon Valley income distribution, 105 Index California Public Employees Retirement System, 214 capital, measuring, 57 capitalism collective (Berle),213 as international, 167 periodizing, 175-176 capital account liberalization, 218 capital flight, 220 capital gains, 89,203 Cappelli, Peter, 76 caring professions, discrimination and, 96 Carrying Capacity Network, 162 Casarini, Luca, 160 Casey Bill, 232 Castells, Manuel, 26,147 Catholic social teaching, 140 Cavanagh,John, 162 cellular phone industry, 198 Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 89-90 central banks.

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Chris Hedges

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Cal Newport, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, Glass-Steagall Act, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, Naomi Klein, offshore financial centre, Plato's cave, power law, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, single-payer health, social intelligence, statistical model, uranium enrichment

They saturate the airwaves, the Internet, newspapers, and magazines with advertisements promoting their brands as the friendly face of the corporation. They have huge legal teams, tens of thousands of employees, and scores of elected officials who ward off public intrusions into their affairs or lawsuits. They hold a near monopoly on all electronic and printed sources of information. A few media giants, such as AOL Time Warner, General Electric, Viacom, Disney, and Rupert Murdoch’s NewsGroup, control nearly everything we read, see, and hear. “Private capital tends to become concentrated in [a] few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of the smaller ones,” Albert Einstein wrote in 1949 in the Monthly Review in explaining why he was a socialist:The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society.

…

Index Abbott, Jennifer Abdul, Paula Abu Ghraib Achbar, Mark Adorno, Theodor Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation Adult Pay Per View Adult Video News (AVN) Awards Adult Video News (AVN) expo Adult Video News (magazine) Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) Afghanistan AIG Amber (Survivor contestant) America by Design (Noble) American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Hedges) American Idol (television show) American Medical Association American Psychiatric Association American Psychological Association (APA) The American Scholar (magazine) America’s Next Top Model (television show) Amusing Ourselves to Death (Postman) Anadarko Petroleum Andersen, Hans Christian Anderson, Pamela Anderson, Ray Andover Andrejevic, Mark Anne, Lisa Annual Positive Psychology Forum Antitrust laws AOL Time Warner Appreciative Inquiry Arendt, Hannah Army War College, U.S. Arnold, Matthew AT&T Broadband Auden, W. H. Augustine, Saint Austro-Hungarian Empire Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment (Seligman) Authorization for Use of Military Force (congressional resolution) Bacevich, Andrew Bakan, Joel Balkans Balzac, Honoré Banks bailing out collapse of faltering and Glass-Steagall Act insolvent leaders of and looting of financial system nationalizing and poor and Stewart Banks, Russell Barry (porn producer) Batista (wrestler) Bear Stearns Bearer, Paul Bellah, Robert N.

The Finance Book: Understand the Numbers Even if You're Not a Finance Professional by Stuart Warner, Si Hussain

AOL-Time Warner, book value, business intelligence, business process, cloud computing, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Costa Concordia, credit crunch, currency risk, discounted cash flows, double entry bookkeeping, forward guidance, intangible asset, Kickstarter, low interest rates, market bubble, Northern Rock, peer-to-peer lending, price discrimination, Ralph Waldo Emerson, shareholder value, supply-chain management, time value of money

For example, the Time Warner/AOL deal in 2001 resulted in goodwill of £128 billion, i.e. this was the premium (i.e. excess) paid by AOL to buy the Time Warner business. Two years on, £60 billion of the goodwill ‘asset’ was written off when the overoptimistic earnings forecasts originally used to justify the premium payment failed to materialise. At the time the acquisition was dubbed ‘the biggest mistake in corporate history’ by an executive closely associated with the deal. The goodwill written-off resulted in a significant fall in the share price of AOL Time Warner, destroying value for shareholders. Cynics often argue that goodwill simply serves as a number on the balance sheet to reflect the extravagance of the buyer!

…

In July 2005, News Corporation acquired MySpace (at the time the largest social networking site in the world) for USD $580 million. However, they sold MySpace six years later in June 2011 for USD $35 million. MySpace lost users to Facebook and Twitter, which developed alternative user experiences. See also Chapter 10 Goodwill and other intangibles for an example of the premium paid by AOL for Time Warner in 2001. In deciding upon a valuation premium, acquirers will account for potential synergistic benefits. Examples of synergies are: Marketing – opportunities to cross-sell and build a bigger brand. Operations – economies of scale, purchasing power and elimination of duplicate costs. Financial – access to cheaper finance (see Chapter 30 Debt finance), lower cost of capital (see Chapter 35 Investment appraisal) and tax benefits (see Chapter 8 Business tax).

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, big-box store, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, death of newspapers, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, fixed income, game design, General Magic , Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, profit maximization, publish or perish, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, The Home Computer Revolution, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

Partly as a result, legal sales of CDs were down 9% in 2002. The executives at the music companies were desperately scrambling, with the elegance of second-graders playing soccer, to agree on a common standard for copy-protecting digital music. Paul Vidich of Warner Music and his corporate colleague Bill Raduchel of AOL Time Warner were working with Sony in that effort, and they hoped to get Apple to be part of their consortium. So a group of them flew to Cupertino in January 2002 to see Jobs. It was not an easy meeting. Vidich had a cold and was losing his voice, so his deputy, Kevin Gage, began the presentation. Jobs, sitting at the head of the conference table, fidgeted and looked annoyed.

…

This is a difficult person to work with if you are a big company. . . . It is a nightmare.” Howard Stringer, then head of Sony North America, added about Jobs: “Trying to get together would frankly be a waste of time.” Instead Sony joined with Universal to create a subscription service called Pressplay. Meanwhile, AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann, and EMI teamed up with RealNetworks to create MusicNet. Neither would license its songs to the rival service, so each offered only about half the music available. Both were subscription services that allowed customers to stream songs but not keep them, so you lost access to them if your subscription lapsed.

…

We’d get second-rate A&R people, just like the music companies ended up with second-rate tech people. I’m one of the few people who understands how producing technology requires intuition and creativity, and how producing something artistic takes real discipline. Jobs had a long relationship with Barry Schuler, the CEO of the AOL unit of Time Warner, and began to pick his brain about how to get the music labels into the proposed iTunes Store. “Piracy is flipping everyone’s circuit breakers,” Schuler told him. “You should use the argument that because you have an integrated end-to-end service, from iPods to the store, you can best protect how the music is used.”

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World by Dambisa Moyo

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, gender pay gap, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, Lyft, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Pershing Square Capital Management, proprietary trading, remote working, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, Washington Consensus, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

Worse still, some acquisitions destroy value and leave the merged company severely weakened. One of the most famed examples of a failed merger was the $165 billion combination of AOL and Time Warner in 2000. Two years later, AOL Time Warner reported a loss of $99 billion—including a $46 billion write-down of the value of AOL. This was attributed, at least in part, to a clash of corporate cultures between old media (Time Warner) and new media (AOL), which impeded the ability of management to successfully integrate the two companies. More recent mergers have run into similar problems. In 2011, the US technology company Hewlett-Packard (HP) acquired UK software company Autonomy for just under $12 billion.

Emergence by Steven Johnson

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, AOL-Time Warner, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Douglas Hofstadter, edge city, epigenetics, game design, garden city movement, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, pez dispenser, phenotype, Potemkin village, power law, price mechanism, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, SimCity, slashdot, social intelligence, Socratic dialogue, stakhanovite, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush

* * * Most attempts to speculate on the state of the Web five years out focus on the endlessly scrutinized dream of “convergence”: the holy trinity of video, audio, and text at long last ushered into your living room via the same delivery mechanism, at speeds sufficient to convey the latest Lucas epic or Eminem release at the quality we’ve come to expect from CDs and DVDs. Once we hit that threshold, the critics like to tell us, the traditional media universe will no longer obey its previous laws of gravity, and a new order will emerge. What that new order will look like is a matter of great dispute. Some see a “one nation under AOL Time Warner” scenario; others envision a Hobbesian melee where everyone who sells zeros and ones is suddenly in the entertainment business. While the analysts disagree on the specifics of life after the revolution, there’s a general consensus that the rise of convergence will finally trigger that last storming of the network media barricades.

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Could the same dispositions that gave the camp or the hamlet a planetary distribution likewise account for such a many-faceted cultural complex as the city?” Mumford, 1961, 90. A community of: These bottom-up solutions are not entirely unopposed. You can make the argument that the real battle of the next ten years on the Web is the battle between hierarchical forces (AOL Time Warner, the Chinese government) and the decentralized forces described in this book. As De Landa observes, “Although antimarket institutions had an early presence in the computer meshwork, today they are set to invade the Internet with unprecedented force. It is possible that the meshworks that have already accumulated within the Internet will prove resilient enough to survive the attack and continue to flourish.

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, East Village, easy for humans, difficult for computers, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, Future Shock, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herman Kahn, high batting average, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, industrial cluster, interest rate swap, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, oil shock, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, prediction markets, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, school choice, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, urban planning, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

“A Note on Paradoxes in Economics.” Kyklos 57 (1):3–20. Aral, Sinan, Lev Muchnik, and Arun Sundararajan. 2009. “Distinguishing Influence-Based Contagion from Homophily-Driven Diffusion in Dynamic Networks.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (51):21544–21549. Arango, Tim. 2010. “How the AOL-Time Warner Merger Went So Wrong.” New York Times, Jan. 10. Arbesman, Sam, and Steven H. Strogatz. 2008. “A Monte Carlo Approach to Joe DiMaggio and Streaks in Baseball.” In http://arxiv.org/abs/0807.5082 [2008]. Arceneaux, Kevin, and David Nickerson. 2009. “Who Is Mobilized to Vote? A Re-Analysis of 11 Field Experiments.”

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See Knee, Greenwald, and Seave (2009) for a discussion of the fallibility of media moguls; and McDonald and Robinson (2009), and Sorkin (2009) for inside accounts of investment banking leaders whose actions precipitated the recent financial crisis. See also recent news stories recounting the failed AOL–Time Warner merger (Arango 2010), and the rampant, ultimately doomed growth of Citigroup (Brooker 2010). 23. Clearly not all attempts at corporate or even government planning end badly. Looking back over the past few centuries, in fact, overall conditions of living have improved dramatically for a large fraction of the world’s populations—evidence that even the largest and most unwieldy political institutions do sometimes get things right.

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bob Geldof, borderless world, Brownian motion, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, colonial rule, content marketing, cotton gin, data science, do well by doing good, East Village, future of journalism, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Golden Gate Park, Googley, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, mirror neurons, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, Plato's cave, post scarcity, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Tim Cook: Apple, Torches of Freedom, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, white flight, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

* * * *1 Before this, personal computers had come in the now unrecognizable form of hobbyist kits, assembled and programmed by guys like Steve Wozniak of Apple. For more, see The Master Switch, 274–75. *2 Example: +++, ATDT (416) 225-9492. *3 The movie also proved an opportunity for the first meetings between AOL and Time Warner executives: Steve Case and Jerry Levin met at a White House screening of the film. See The Master Switch, chapter 19. *4 The “floppy” disk was a magnetic storage medium used in the 1980s and early 1990s, originally the size of a dinner napkin, that was inserted into a “disk drive” that resembled a toaster.

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Nonetheless, BuzzFeed was still growing, and as the decade reached its midpoint, was pegged at $850 million in value; then, over the summer of 2015, the cable giant Comcast bought a stake that valued the company at $1.5 billion. Comcast’s investment in BuzzFeed was at last a consummation of the union between the old and the new media such as Microsoft and AOL–Time Warner had once contemplated, though now involving far less money than in those headier days. For comparison’s sake, though, it is worth remarking that The Washington Post, with its forty-seven Pulitzer Prizes, was purchased by Amazon for $250 million in 2013—old media valuations clearly weren’t what they used to be, either.

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People to See. Places to Go,” Popular Science 235, no. 2 (1989) : 7; CompuServe, “He Was a Sales Force of One. Until He Got CompuServe. Now He’s a Sales Force to Be Reckoned With,” Popular Science 243, no. 3 (1993) : 17. 2. Alec Klein, Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 10. 3. Robert D. Shapiro, “This Is Not Your Father’s Prodigy,” Wired, June 1, 1993, http://www.wired.com/​1993/​06/​prodigy/. 4. Ibid. 5. Kara Swisher, Aol.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads, and Made Millions in the War for the Web (New York: Times Books, 1998), 89. 6.

The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory by John Seabrook

AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, financial independence, game design, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the long tail, trade route

AS THE RECORD INDUSTRY entered the twenty-first century, five global music groups controlled more than 70 percent of the market. The Universal Music Group, owned by Vivendi Universal, was the dominant player among the majors; it was run by Doug Morris. Then came the Warner Music Group, a division of AOL Time Warner, headed by Roger Ames. Warner had been the leading company in the record industry from the early ’70s to the mid-’90s, but by the end of 2002, with a 16 percent share of the domestic market, Warner—“Warner’s” is what you said if you were in the business, as if it were Jack Warner’s corner record store—had fallen well behind Universal, which had a 29 percent share.

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Aaliyah, 60, 106 ABBA, 29, 90, 126, 186 hits of, 37–38 influence of, 37–38, 75 meticulous craft of, 37, 38 Abbey Road studios, 6 ABC TV, 103 Abdul, Paula, 126, 130, 131 AC/DC, 59, 307 Ace of Base, 35–39, 41–46, 63, 64, 81, 98, 138, 209, 303 Advertigo, 289, 290 Aguilera, Christina, 51, 85, 232, 255 Åhlund, Klas, 38 Aiken, Clay, 145 “Ain’t No Nigga,” 181 “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now,” 171 Airships International, 47–48 Air Supply, 42 AJ, see McLean, AJ AJ and Howie, D, 52 Aldon Music, 68, 69, 70 “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” 112 Alford, Mary, 49 All I Ever Wanted, 145 “All I Need,” 254 “All Out of Love,” 42 “All That I Need,” 173 “All That Matters (The Beautiful Life),” 276 “All That She Wants,” 39–40, 41–42, 44, 45 All the Rave (Menn), 118 Alpha Entertainment, 165 “Already Gone,” 145, 202 Alsou, 173 Alternative Nation, 96 Alwood, Lester, 112 Amatiello, John, 64 “American Girl,” 266 video of, 64, 263 American Greed (TV show), 100 American Idol (TV show), 42, 105, 124–32, 179, 182 auditions for, 127–28, 130 Big Band Week on, 131 careers launched by, 145–46 Hollywood Week on, 128–29, 130–31 humiliation of contestants on, 128, 130 judges on, 124, 126, 127–28, 130–31, 204 ratings of, 128, 131 ’60s week on, 131 winners on, 130–32, 137, 138, 141 American Idol: The Untold Story (Rushfield), 128 American Music Awards, 228 American Top 40, 79 America’s Got Talent (TV show), 146 Ames, Roger, 115, 133 Ammo, 275, 276 Anaheim, Calif., 154–55, 158–59, 162–65 Anderson, Chris, 15 Andersson, Anni-Frid, 38 Andersson, Benny, 37, 38 Andrea True Connection, 40 Andrews Sisters, 112 Anka, Paul, 172 “Another Mother,” 35 Anthony, Michelle, 118 Anthony, Polly, 86 AOL, 133 AOL Time Warner, 115 Apartheid, 58 Appetite for Self-Destruction (Knopper), 101 Apple, 133–34, 286, 294, 298–99 Apple, Fiona, 254 Apple Music, 298 Arbitron, 79 Areola, 83–84 Areola Munich, 101 Arista Records, 41, 45, 59–60, 126, 137 Arkansas, University of, Music Cognition Lab at, 303–4 Army, US, 150 arpeggiator software, 227, 231 ARP Odyssey synthesizers, 30 arrangers, 6, 10 Arsenio Hall Show (TV show), 50 artists, 29 A-list, 6 black, 46, 68, 90 discovering and developing of, 42 earnings of, 13, 15–16, 25 female, 42, 59 “manufactures,” 121 power of writers and producers vs., 67–68 R&B, 60 rap, 33, 34, 60 rock, 138 small but loyal followings of, 15 as vocal personalities vs. singers, 7 artists and repertoire (A&R), 39, 42, 55, 58, 63–64, 81, 86–89, 105, 119 see also specific record companies ASCAP, 105, 227 ASCAP Expo, 211 A Side Productions, 123 “As Long as You Love Me,” 82 Asphalt, 248 Astley, Rick, 73 Atlanta, Ga., 46, 180, 187, 188, 196–98 Atlantic Records, 14, 53, 116 A&R department of, 270 “At Last,” 130 Australia, 72–73, 124, 258 Autobahn, 30 “Autobahn,” 30 Auto-Tune, 223, 237, 273 Avicii, 287, 297 Azalea, Iggy, xiii, 6 Azra, 55 Babyface, 46 “. . .

The Greed Merchants: How the Investment Banks Exploited the System by Philip Augar

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, deal flow, equity risk premium, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, information retrieval, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, new economy, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, risk free rate, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, systematic bias, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, tulip mania, value at risk, yield curve

Finance knew what was best for the economy and accordingly by paying heed to financial markets we would increase growth and prosperity.’31 And so on Millennium Eve, with the Dow up 25 per cent for the year, its ninth straight annual increase, and the NASDAQ up a towering 86 per cent for the year, it seemed good to be alive, good to be an investor and great to be an investment banker, a Master of the Universe. This time, no kidding. The Smoking Gun To begin with, the new millennium went according to plan. In January 2000 news broke of the $166 billion merger between AOL, the iconoclastic internet company, and Time Warner, the ‘old media’ blue chip. Time Warner owned stalwarts of American society such as CNN and the HBO, Time, Fortune and Sports Illustrated magazines, and the Warner Brothers studios. AOL was less than fifteen years old yet already it had 22 million subscribers. The combination excited the pundits, who thought it would create ‘a globally powerful company that combines old media power and content with new media speed’.32 The merger seemed to confirm the convergence of the new and old economies and fired up enthusiasm for internet stocks still further.

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The old economy indices, the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones, had already run out of steam in 1999 and by the end of 2001 a full scale bear market had developed. Fortunes were lost and retirement plans hastily revised. In March 2002, barely two years after the market peak, losses totalled $4 trillion. Almost 30 per cent had been wiped off the value of the stock market holdings of 100 million American investors. Events at AOL-Time Warner summed up the extraordinary change in mood. Barely twelve months after the acclaimed epoch-defining merger, the company announced incredible losses of $54 billion for the first quarter of 2002, having been forced to reassess and write down the value of its over-hyped assets.34 The lifeblood of the investment banks dried up as the bear market took hold.

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Shareholders of the buying firms saw their wealth reduced by $240 billion, representing 12 per cent of the purchase price. The wealth destruction was concentrated amongst the biggest equity-financed deals; the bigger the deal, the worse the results.30 Often there was a sharp deterioration in acquirer performance for several years after the deal is done.31 The merger of AOL and Time Warner in 2000 is a case in point. As we saw in Chapter 1, the deal was intended to create a world-class modern media company but instead led to the largest losses in corporate history. Bankers such as the legendary dealmaker Bruce Wasserstein are dismissive of the value-destroying arguments: ‘The problem with many academic studies is that they make questionable assumptions to squeeze untidy data points into a pristine statistical model.’32 But the weight of evidence from the late-twentieth-century merger wave seems to show that the handsome profits made by the selling shareholders were usually offset by subsequent losses for the acquirers.

The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. by William D. Cohan

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, deal flow, diversification, Donald Trump, East Village, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, interest rate swap, intermodal, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Michael Milken, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short squeeze, SoftBank, stock buybacks, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, Yogi Berra

., of the controversial 1989 deal creating the highly leveraged Tim Warner, but Bruce had also trumpeted his involvement in the landmark AOL acquisition of Time Warner in 2000 despite having had no role in the deal. When it suited Bruce and improved Wasserstein Perella's rankings in the M&A league tables--for instance, on the eve of the sale of his firm to the Germans--he claimed credit for the largest U.S. merger of all time. When it no longer suited him--for instance, when the deal proved to be an embarrassing disaster--Bruce ran, metaphorically, like the wind. Indeed, many blame both the original Time-Warner merger and the ill-fated AOL-Time Warner merger for creating the situation the dissident shareholders--and now Bruce and Lazard--were fighting to improve.

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To raised eyebrows, Bruce blamed Time Warner management for creating a "corporate inferno" that immolated at least $40 billion in shareholder value through a combination of, among other things, "bloated overhead" (evidenced by the company's new corporate headquarters at Columbus Circle and its fleet of corporate aircraft) and a "history of ineffectual deal execution" (for instance, losing the acquisition of AT&T Broadband to Comcast and selling Warner Music to a private-equity consortium for far less than it later proved to be worth) that allowed competitors to "take advantage of TWX." "The Lazard Report" did betray Bruce's ongoing sensitivity about his role--or lack thereof--in the disastrous AOL-Time Warner merger when he directed the Lazard team to footnote the utterly irrelevant fact that Wasserstein Perella was not the only Wall Street firm to claim credit for the AOL-Time Warner merger without actually working on the deal. At the St. Regis, Bruce spoke first and articulated the Lazard solution. "Time has not been friendly to Time Warner over the last three years," he said. "The time to implement change is urgent."

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If that proved to be true, at the midpoint--around $25 a share--Time Warner's stock would have increased nearly 40 percent, and Lazard's total fee would be in the vicinity of $55 million, right up there with the largest single M&A fee ever paid ($60 million to Citigroup for its advice in the AOL-Time Warner deal). "If Dick Parsons indeed has the secret super-spicy sauce to deliver and generate value, we all say, 'Hallelujah' and 'God Bless,'" Bruce said in conclusion, attempting humor. The Lazard brethren in attendance were positively giddy after the presentation. "What do you think of the new Lazard?"

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business climate, citizen journalism, computer vision, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Dennis Ritchie, digital divide, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, experimental economics, experimental subject, Extropian, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, more computing power than Apollo, move 37, Multics, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, pez dispenser, planetary scale, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, social intelligence, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, web of trust, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Coaxial cable owners that offer high-speed Internet access already prevent their users from running servers or hosting Web pages and are preventing content that competes with the cable owner’s own content from running on their parts of the Internet. The AT&TMediaOne merger created a huge cable infrastructure that AT&T controlled. AOL-Time-Warner created a huge cable infrastructure that AOL controlled, and now they’re trying to put them both together into a single cable infrastructure for a large part of the Internet. As cable providers consolidate ownership, they are increasingly asserting their right to decide how people can use the network.

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What if smart mobs could empower entire populations to engage in peer-to-peer journalism? Imagine the impact of the Rodney King video multiplied by the people power of Napster. What if people beamed WearComp video to the Web, offering continuous views of breaking events that hitherto have been available only from Newscorp, AOL-Time-Warner, and Disney? Would it be possible to turn the table on the surveillance society and counter the media monopolies? What would be the effect on public opinion if thousands of WearComp-equipped citizens webcast all they saw and heard? Wild as it sounds, mobile squads of citizen telejournalists have already surfaced.

All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, book value, call centre, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency peg, David Brooks, Donald Trump, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, George Gilder, high net worth, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Maui Hawaii, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Norman Mailer, PageRank, Peter Singer: altruism, pez dispenser, popular electronics, Quicken Loans, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, school vouchers, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech baron, tech billionaire, Teledyne, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning, wealth creators, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

Perhaps the most dramatic example in recent years of what happens when you have good instincts—and when you don’t—came with the crash of the dot-com economy in 2001, which highlighted the gulf between those who timed their cashing out well and those who didn’t. One of the most vocal losers during the crash was Ted Turner. Turner’s fortune was wrapped up in Time Warner, which had merged with Turner Broadcasting System in 1996. Following the subsequent merger of Time Warner and America Online (AOL) in 2000, AOL Time Warner stock fell 81 percent, wiping billions off Turner’s net worth—from $9.1 billion in 2000 to $2.2 billion in 2002. “I’m the stupidest person23 in the world not to have sold earlier,” Turner said in 2003, shortly after reducing his stake in the company by selling 60 million shares. Archimedes gave the world new insights into science, mathematics, and engineering.

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In 2006 he announced: Merissa Marr, “Geffen’s Goodbye,” Wall Street Journal, Dec. 8, 2006. 20. “He is bored”: Fabrikant and Waxman, “A Mogul Ponders.” 21. Unlike the old Hollywood movie moguls: John Motavalli, Bamboozled at the Revolution: How Big Media Lost Billions in the Battle for the Internet (New York: Viking, 2002). Motavalli cites a 1998 interview with Bob Pittman of AOL Time Warner in which Pittman explained the “phenomenal success of cable in this way: ‘The three networks looked at the cable business and chose not to start a cable network because they didn’t want to ding their earnings to build a new business. They said, “If it ever gets big, then we’ll come in.” But by the time they got in, Ted Turner had news, ESPN had sports, MTV had music, Nickelodeon had kids and there was no opportunity’” (p. 15). 22.

The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age by Tim Wu

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Big Tech, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, move fast and break things, new economy, open economy, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, price discrimination, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, The Chicago School

In reality, a large corporation is made up of sub-units, whether functional or regional, or independent operations that have been previously acquired. It is not “impossible” to administer a breakup as is sometimes claimed. Many breakups are akin to the spinoffs or dissolutions that are not uncommon in business practice as it stands, such as AOL-Time-Warner’s decision to break itself up into multiple units in the early 2000s. While the purpose is and should be public benefit, in some cases, like Standard Oil, the breakup may actually be healthy for the firm itself, but thanks to ego, otherwise known as agency problems, something it would not do itself.

Understanding Sponsored Search: Core Elements of Keyword Advertising by Jim Jansen

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, bounce rate, business intelligence, butterfly effect, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, data science, en.wikipedia.org, first-price auction, folksonomy, Future Shock, information asymmetry, information retrieval, intangible asset, inventory management, life extension, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine translation, megacity, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, PageRank, place-making, power law, price mechanism, psychological pricing, random walk, Schrödinger's Cat, sealed-bid auction, search costs, search engine result page, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sentiment analysis, social bookmarking, social web, software as a service, stochastic process, tacit knowledge, telemarketer, the market place, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, yield management

To see the entire SERP, a searcher may have to scroll on the browser to the bottom portion of the SERP. Potpourri: Why do search engines list the advertisements in a separate listing? One of the major reasons was a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed by Commercial Alert in July 2001 against AltaVista, AOL Time Warner, Direct Hit Technologies, iWon, LookSmart, Microsoft, and Lycos [27]. The complaint alleged that the confusion caused in consumers who saw mixed paid and unpaid results in a combined listing constituted fraud in advertising by the search engines. After that, by convention, the sponsored results are listed separately, or at least labeled as sponsored if they are integrated with organic results.

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Index 3 Cs, 131, 140–141 4 Ps, 130–131 7 Ps, 131, 140–141 8 Life Forces, 125 80–20 rule, 51, 136 A/B testing, 164–165 above the fold, 3, 21, 61 accretion, 159–160 achieve, 6, 25, 111, 124, 196 Action, Location, Price and Quality (ALPQ) terms, 69 ad copy, ix, 24, 61, 138, 140, 183–184, 207 ad rank, 74, 77–78, 178 advertising agency, 61, 122 advertising blockage, 120 AdWords, 14–15, 18, 180–181, 185 aesthetic sensations, 125 affiliation, 124 affordances, 2, 37, 130 aggress, 124 AIDA model, 94 allocation mechanism, 178 AltaVista, 13, 21, 38, 44 American Marketing Association, 139, 152 analysis of variances, 165 Anomalous States of Knowledge, 43 AOL Time Warner, 21 Asimov, Isaac, ix, 47, 96 attention, 5, 28, 55, 61, 68, 72, 116, 121–122, 124–126, 133–134, 153, 203, 205 Aucnet, 179 Auction theory, 180, 182, 210 autonomy, 125 Back of napkin calculations, 195 Baidu, 179 Bailey, P., 116 BAM framework, 140 band wagon effect, 114 Banister, Scott, 11 banner ads, 10–11, 19 Battelle, John, 31 A Beautiful Mind, 197 behavior, 33–38, 44–45, 47–49, 54, 63, 66–67, 70–72, 74, 80–82, 85–87, 94, 99, 101, 115, 151, 155–161, 168, 170, 189, 196, 210–213, 220, 222, 224 behaviorism, 156–157, 170–171, 210, 213 behaviors, x, xi, 34–36, 38, 42–43, 45, 49, 55, 62, 71, 74–75, 86–88, 94, 99, 114–115, 152, 156–159, 161–163, 167, 171, 210–212, 221–222, 226 below the fold, 21, 43 Bernbach, Bill, 61 Bhatia, Sabeer, 134 bid, xxi, 4–5, 12, 14, 19–20, 39, 119–120, 141, 170, 178–182, 184–200, 203, 209 Bierbaum, E.

The Invisible Hands: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Bubbles, Crashes, and Real Money by Steven Drobny

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, commodity super cycle, commodity trading advisor, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, debt deflation, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, equity risk premium, family office, fiat currency, fixed income, follow your passion, full employment, George Santayana, global macro, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inventory management, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Minsky moment, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, North Sea oil, open economy, peak oil, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discovery process, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, savings glut, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, short selling, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical arbitrage, stochastic volatility, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, survivorship bias, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Thomas Bayes, time value of money, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two and twenty, unbiased observer, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

The lesson learned from that is never short a market that’s skyrocketing because, even if you think it’s doing something completely and utterly irrational, financial flows can keep it behaving irrationally for some time for no other reason than just pure momentum. Risk management is often learned the hard way, and this was one of those occasions. I finally stopped out of my short and gave up when the AOL-Time Warner deal happened. The fact that emerging tech companies like AOL could merge with an established old world company like Time Warner made me reconsider my bearish view. I thought, wow, maybe the NASDAQ can go to 7,000 or 10,000 if transactions like this become a new trend. Of course, that deal turned out to be close to the top of the market. (See Figure 8.6.) Figure 8.6 NASDAQ Index, 1995-2003 SOURCE: Bloomberg.

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Index Absolute return, generation Accounting leverage, economic leverage (contrast) Active management, passive management (combination) Active managers, search process Active risk allocation, importance Active risk management, dedication Adaptability call Agricultural commodities, prices Agricultural futures (1977-2009) AIG, bailout Alchemy of Finance, The (Soros) Allocators, future adaptability Alpha beta, contrast central bank source extraction, zero-sum game generation policy change, impact providing, policy error (usage) risk-adjusted measure Alpha-seeking macro fund Alternative energy source, supply (increase) Annual cash demands, short-term constraints Annual cash flows, importance AOL-Time Warner deal Armageddon scenario, extrapolation Asia crisis (1997) repeat Asia crisis (1998-1999) Asia currencies, bullishness Asian equities impact perspective Asia performance Asset-backed securities index (ABX), problem Asset/liability matching Assets allocation, function collapse deflation, renewal expected return generation purchase (Buffett) Asymmetric bet example structure Back tests Backwardation Bacow, Larry Bailouts, usage Balance sheets availability strength Baltic dry shipping rate (1998-2009) Bank capital ratios, Basel II framework (usage) Bank of International Settlements (BIS), turnover data Banks balance sheets, problems implosion leverage ratios Bayesian methods Bear market Bear Stearns bailout government bond leverage change perspective (Bernanke) Beauty contest, concept Benchmark Beneficiaries, payments (impact) Bernanke, Ben actions Bear Stearns perspective debt deflation perspective success/error Beta alpha, contrast correlation portfolio Beta-plus domination Big Oil Black box applications, naivete Black swan Bolton, Anthony Bond option positions, leverage Bond repurchase agreement (repo) Bonds attractiveness Bond Trader perspective collapse fixed interest markets, rout (1994) perspective (Drobny Global Conference) portfolio purchase, leverage (usage) traders vigilantes Bond Trader, The capital allocation determination central banks, alpha source diversification firm-level risk management fixed income trading hedge fund/prop desk, contrast inputs, usage interview liquidity, measurement process market change focus positioning, importance money managers, meeting options, usage performance positions, scaling sizing determination time horizon traders control hiring trades consideration miss worst-case scenario trading ideas wealth maximization Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC) Break-even inflation Brent crude British Telecom, pension fund (Commodity Trader hiring) Bubbles.

The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin

AOL-Time Warner, PalmPilot, Socratic dialogue

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my diligent and inspiring editor, Leigh Haber, as well as my conscripted friends who were forced to read various drafts and held in a cellar until they offered in-depth commentary: Sarah Paley, Carol Muske-Dukes, Deborah Solomon, Sherle and John, Victoria Dailey, Susan Wheeler, April and Eric and Mary Karr. I would also like to thank Ricky Jay, who in minutes assembled a short treatise for my enlightenment on magic squares from his own amazing library. And Duke. eBook Info Title: The Pleasure of My Company Creator: Steve Martin Publisher: AOL Time Warner Identifier: 1-4013-9879-0 Format: Mobipocket Reader 4.3 build 363 Language: en-us Table of Contents eBook Info The Pleasure of My Company

Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst: A True Story of Inside Information and Corruption in the Stock Market by Daniel Reingold, Jennifer Reingold

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, corporate governance, deal flow, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, George Gilder, high net worth, informal economy, junk bonds, margin call, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, Michael Milken, new economy, pets.com, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Telecommunications Act of 1996, thinkpad, traveling salesman, undersea cable, UUNET

Because Global was perhaps the premier “new-economy” company in the telecom sector and had been seen as purely an international play, its decision to acquire Frontier was a shocker. Frontier was an old-economy real telecom company, not a virtual one. This meant a major strategy change for Global Crossing. The deal, which preceded the AOL–Time Warner merger by almost a year, was the first case in which an upstart new-age company with few customers but major growth expectations used its high stock valuation to buy a traditional company. Global Crossing was offering a very rich price for Frontier of $62 per share, 41.3 percent above Frontier’s current price of $43.88.

…

earnings of evolving role of Fair Disclosure rule and Grubman model of highest-paid incentivized bonuses and inherent conflicts faced by inside information and intimidation of investigations of investment bank interaction with investment bank severance from IPO boom and as keys to massive deals new NASD standards for perks of pliability of pressures on reform proposals for restricted periods and role of ruined reputations of social contacts and See also I.I. rankings; research reports Anchor Bar (Buffalo) Andersen. See Arthur Andersen Andreessen, Mark Animal Farm (Orwell) Annunziata, Bob Anschutz, Phil Nacchio’s dismissal by stock sales of Anschutz Corporation antitrust telecom mergers and AOL AOL–Time Warner merger arbitrageurs (arbs) arb spread Armour, Tim Armstrong, C. Michael (Mike) AT&T action plan of AT&T restructuring and AT&T tracker and background/personality of Comcast bid and current situation of Global Telecom CEO Conference and Arthur Andersen Asian telecom privatization AT&T antitrust breakup of Baby Bells as threat to cellular coverage and Comcast bid and financial problems of Grubman’s downgrade of Grubman’s upgrade of Grubman–Weill relationship and leadership change at local startups and price wars and Reingold’s downgrade of Reingold’s upgrade of restructuring of SBC purchase of tracking stock and AT&T Broadband AT&T Labs At&T Long Distance AT&T Wireless IPO underwriters Avoid rating Baby Bells cellular coverage and competition and Grubman’s view of local startups and as long distance service mergers and Reingold’s view of strengthened position of See also specific companies Baker, Richard bandwidth banking.

Competition Demystified by Bruce C. Greenwald

additive manufacturing, airline deregulation, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, book value, business cycle, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, deindustrialization, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fault tolerance, intangible asset, John Nash: game theory, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, PalmPilot, Pepsi Challenge, pets.com, price discrimination, price stability, revenue passenger mile, search costs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, vertical integration, warehouse automation, yield management, zero-sum game

If bargaining can produce most of the gains of direct combination, the premium paid must be minimal to be fully warranted. When the acquisition is paid for in stock rather than cash, the calculations may need to be adjusted. In the AOL–Time Warner merger referred to earlier, AOL clearly overpaid, based on the size of potential cost savings compared with the premium over market price. But AOL used its own stock, which by almost any valuation measure was grossly inflated, for the purchase. Buying Time Warner with a debased currency made the deal a profitable one for AOL shareholders, although it took a while for that fact to become apparent. While it is generally better to be on the selling rather than the buying side in M&A transactions, when the acquirer pays with its own stock, using a currency whose future value it knows much more about than anyone else, then even the target must exercise care.

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The applications programs are more frequently sold directly to users. Some of these applications programs are produced by the operating system software companies; some come from specialized providers like Adobe and Intuit. Finally, PC owners today almost invariably connect their machines to the Internet through network service providers, like AOL, Earthlink, MSN, Time Warner, or the regional telephone companies that allow them to communicate with other users. Yahoo, Google, and other Internet sites are also in the network segment, broadly conceived. FIGURE 4.2 Map of the personal computer industry (first version) An initial industry map almost invariably represents a compromise between the virtues of simplicity and tractability, on the one hand, and the requirements of comprehensiveness, on the other.

…

If company executives and the bankers promoting merger and acquisition deals were forced to justify the proposed combinations using this test, it is likely many transactions would never see the light of day. (Admittedly, one should never underestimate the power of a compelling projection based on unwarranted hopes, a professional-looking spreadsheet, and an elegant PowerPoint presentation.) AOL’s acquisition of Time Warner, for which it paid a premium of roughly $50 billion, was justified by $600 million of anticipated annual cost savings. The cumulative value of these savings, appropriately discounted, was certainly less than $10 billion. AT&T bought cable properties where little or no cost savings were expected.

Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cognitive load, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, general purpose technology, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, new economy, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, patent troll, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Sand Hill Road, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social software, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine

Patrick and I have a long relationship, starting when I was 18 years old and he kicked in toward a scholarship fund to send me to a writers' workshop, continuing to a fateful lunch in New York in the mid-Nineties when I showed him a bunch of Project Gutenberg texts on my Palm Pilot and inspired him to start licensing Tor's titles for PDAs [PEANUTPRESS SCREENGRAB], to the turn-of-the-millennium when he bought and then published my first novel (he's bought three more since — I really like Patrick!). Right as bookwarez newsgroups were taking off, I was shocked silly by legal action by one of my colleagues against AOL/Time-Warner for carrying the alt.binaries.ebooks newsgroup. This writer alleged that AOL should have a duty to remove this newsgroup, since it carried so many infringing files, and that its failure to do so made it a contributory infringer, and so liable for the incredibly stiff penalties afforded by our newly minted copyright laws like the No Electronic Theft Act and the loathsome Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA.

Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, borderless world, business process, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, industrial cluster, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, new economy, North Sea oil, pneumatic tube, race to the bottom, railway mania, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, wage slave, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Meanwhile, its boss, Bernard Ebbers, had apparently treated the company as a piggy bank, borrowing hundreds of millions of dollars when it suited him. WorldCom’s stock, which peaked at $64.50 in 1999, stopped trading at 83 cents, costing investors about $175 billion—nearly three times what was lost in the implosion of Enron. A stream of other scandals followed: Xerox and AOL Time Warner had to revise their accounts. The former boss of Tyco, who had taken home $300 million in just three years, was charged with evading $1 million in sales tax on paintings. The boss of ImClone was accused of insider trading; the founder of Adelphia was charged with defrauding investors. (Nobody was particularly surprised when a survey showed that 82 percent of chief executives admitted to cheating at golf.)34 Meanwhile, investors fumed when they discovered that Wall Street analysts had been misleading them with Orwellian doublespeak: to the cognoscenti, a “buy” recommendation meant “hold” and “hold” meant “run like hell.”

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, buy and hold, call centre, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, deal flow, Douglas Hofstadter, drop ship, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, fulfillment center, game design, housing crisis, invention of movable type, inventory management, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Larry Ellison, late fees, loose coupling, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Rodney Brooks, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Skype, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, zero-sum game

He had a well-honed instinct for big, mass-culture books and an intuitive feel for survival inside large corporations. When AOL acquired Time Warner in 2000, he directed the staff of Warner Books to wear I Heart AOL T-shirts and made a video of everyone standing around a piano singing “Unforgettable” (the company had just published Natalie Cole’s autobiography). He was thinking about e-books—and losing money on them—long before almost anyone else in the industry. Kirshbaum reentered a very different environment than the one he had left in 2005 when he departed AOL Time Warner to become an agent. Animosity toward Amazon had become a defining fact of life in the book business.

A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market by John Allen Paulos

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business climate, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elliott wave, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Erdős number, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, four colour theorem, George Gilder, global village, greed is good, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, mental accounting, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, short selling, six sigma, Stephen Hawking, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, transaction costs, two and twenty, ultimatum game, UUNET, Vanguard fund, Yogi Berra

Usually a hardheaded fellow, I was nevertheless falling disastrously in love. Although my particular heartthrob was WCOM, almost all of what I will say about my experience is unfortunately applicable to many other stocks and many other investors. Wherever WCOM appears, you may wish to substitute the symbols for Lucent, Tyco, Intel, Yahoo, AOL-Time Warner, Global Crossing, Enron, Adelphia, or, perhaps, the generic symbols WOE or BANE. The time frame of the book—in the midst of a market collapse after a heady, nearly decade-long surge—may also appear rather more specific and constraining than it is. Almost all the points made herein are rather general or can be generalized with a little common sense.

Philanthrocapitalism by Matthew Bishop, Michael Green, Bill Clinton

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, business process outsourcing, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital divide, do well by doing good, don't be evil, family office, financial innovation, full employment, global pandemic, global village, Global Witness, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Dyson, John Elkington, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, lone genius, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market bubble, mass affluent, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Singer: altruism, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working poor, World Values Survey, X Prize

“Bill Gates told me once, ‘Thank you for drawing my attention to philanthropy,’ ” he says in one monologue; then, “Men should be banned from public office for a hundred years”; then, “You’d look ten years younger if you wore a hairpiece.” In his business career, this limited attention span might be blamed for some truly bad decisions, such as his enthusiasm for the 2000 merger of Time Warner (by then the owner of CNN) and AOL, which cost Time Warner billions of dollars. But, equally, it did not stop him from making some hugely successful bets, such as creating CNN, and later, becoming the largest private landowner and bison farmer in America. As his executives say, with a mixture of resignation and respect, “That’s just the way Ted is.”

…

Described as “a unique platform for the best minds of our generation,” the futuristic gathering throws together leading artists, scientists, politicians, business leaders, and other interesting thinkers in blue-sky discussions of topics ranging from “Inside the Brain of the Terrorist” to “The Body, Health, and Globalization.” Pledging $1 billion is one thing, handing over the money quite another. The disastrous performance of the combined AOL Time Warner, and the general troubles of the stock market following the bursting of the dot-com bubble, did serious damage to Turner’s fortune. For a while, it seemed that he would be unable to honor his pledges. “I’d lost eighty percent of my wealth; it didn’t look like I’d be able to afford it,” Turner says.

Television Is the New Television: The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age by Michael Wolff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Carl Icahn, commoditize, creative destruction, digital divide, disintermediation, Golden age of television, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Joseph Schumpeter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Milken, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, telemarketer, the medium is the message, vertical integration, zero-sum game

This new breed, less focused on advertising and more focused on fees, and all out of the nascent cable industry, came to control the media business: Jeff Bewkes, CEO of Time Warner; Chase Carey, COO of 21st Century Fox; Sumner Redstone, who built Viacom; Tom Freston, who came out of MTV to run Viacom; Bob Pittman, MTV’s founder, who spearheaded the rise of AOL and its merger with Time Warner, and who now runs Clear Channel; Philippe Dauman, the current CEO of Viacom; and Ted Turner, in many ways the originator of the cable programming model with CNN and the Turner Broadcasting properties. The singular and necessary accomplishment, beyond getting a critical mass of cable companies to carry your station (for a period this resulted in a lot of ownership trade-offs—we’ll carry you, if you give us an ownership stake), was to get a share of the subscription fees.

…

In other words, Moonves had reinvented broadcast television; a lagging business became a growth industry. Meanwhile, Time Warner, having spun off its own cable company—next to Comcast, the nation’s second largest—became itself an effective pure content play. (It had already jettisoned its music company; it would soon get rid of its troubled AOL division; and it would eventually spin off its magazines.) Time Warner’s essential business became its negotiation with cable operators for HBO, CNN, and the Turner channels. In a remarkable turnaround, Time Warner, which had, not long ago, nearly broken itself with a bet on a digital future, saw its cable fees rise so quickly that, in little more than half a decade following Icahn’s play for the company and his call to streamline it into a pure content play, its share price had doubled (a doubling even without cable, AOL, and publishing—all spun off to the shareholders).

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A&E Networks, 61, 65, 117 ABC, 183 Abrahamsen, Kurt, 2 Advance Communications, 116, 117 advertising: adjacency strategy of, 59 ad-skipping devices, 49, 84, 96 and audience, 63, 72–73, 87, 198–99 billboards, 77, 115 brand, 23–24, 25, 26, 49–50, 67, 182–83 buying space vs. making ads, 48, 57, 63, 87–88 classified, 69, 115 and content, 59, 63, 84, 158 CPMs, 52, 65, 66, 71–72, 73 direct mail, 55–56, 69–70, 86 direct-response, 24, 25, 26, 85, 87 display, 69 dual markets for, 80–81, 85–88 falling prices of, 33, 50, 51, 52, 70–73, 74, 78, 167 global online industry, 75–76 government regulation of, 56 low tolerance for, 83–85 market predictions for, 79 and mass media, 123 measuring effectiveness of, 71–72, 79, 84–85, 87 media, 18, 21, 52 print, 25, 54, 69–71 programmatic buying/selling, 73, 76–80 as pyramid scheme, 57–58 remnant space for, 78 response rate, 55, 56–57, 72 as revenue source, 41, 43, 48 revolution in, 69–74 sales, 40–41, 56 and sports, 181–88 television, 24, 25, 40, 70, 79–80, 83–84, 99, 115, 119, 125, 129 too much space, 76 and YouTube, 153, 154–55 Advertising Week, New York, 21 Aereo, 112 aggregation, 18–19, 50–51, 59, 66, 190, 195–96 Ailes, Roger, 119 Alibaba, 19, 20 Allen, Mel, 182 Amazon, 42, 110, 112, 142, 161, 169 Andreessen, Marc, 2, 3, 4, 39, 60, 83, 97 AOL: and Huffington Post, 12, 58 and newspaper format, 18, 33, 189 and Time Warner, 11, 117, 126, 132, 159 Apple, 101–5 Apple TV, 109, 112, 113 Arledge, Roone, 183, 187 AT&T, 135, 136 audience: and advertising, 63, 72–73, 87, 198–99 auctions for, 77 behavior patterns of, 50 building, 47, 48, 50 and carriage, 125, 184–85 cost vs. profitability of, 54 demographics of, 73, 78 downmarket vs. upmarket, 192 drive-by, 54 eyeballs of, 57, 77–78 holding the attention of, 32, 50, 67, 71, 74 identifying, 47–49 illusory nature of, 64, 73–74 manipulation of, 50 mass, 35, 76, 195 measuring and monitoring, 48–50, 57, 77 migration of, 70 monetizing, 16, 40 and pay cable, 47–48 programming focused on, 128 and scarcity premium, 72 self-selected, 78 stand-alone unbranded entities, 78–79 as traffic, 18–19, 49–53, 73, 86, 196 value of, 48, 49 you don’t own it, 53, 54 Auletta, Ken, 95–100 Bartz, Carol, 19 Bewkes, Jeffrey, 121, 126 Blockbuster, 91 Blu-ray DVD players, 110–11 books, 115, 117, 124 broadband, 109, 135, 138–41 broadcast, 108, 112, 131, 168 BSkyB, 120 bundling-unbundling-rebundling, 171–78 BuzzFeed, 12, 18, 23, 57, 58–61, 62, 66, 67, 87, 102, 189, 193–94, 195–96, 199 cable companies: and broadband, 140–41 and bundling/unbundling, 174–78 bypassing fees of, 112 and costs, 99–100, 174 declining quality of, 168 deregulation of, 127 and digital access, 133 and government bureaucracy, 139 and Internet, 125, 129, 130, 135 mean and stingy deals from, 10 and “must-carry rule,” 131 pay cable model, 47–48, 113, 127 paying content providers, 125–26, 127, 130, 133 and sports, 184–85 streaming, 99–100 and television, see television upgrades, 134, 168 Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act (1992), 96, 131 Cannes Lions Festival, France, 21 Carey, Chase, 126 Carlson, Nicholas, 21–22 carriage, 125, 126, 131–32, 184–85 CBS, 97, 118, 121, 129, 130, 131, 160, 185, 198 Chiat, Jay, 101–2 Clear Channel, 116, 126 click fraud, 26, 74 CNN, 22, 32, 35, 65, 95, 126, 130, 132 Coleman, Greg, 58 Comcast, 10, 116, 120, 130, 132–36, 138, 143–44, 175, 185 Comedy Central, 3, 5, 130 computers: cloud, 108 as entertainment devices, 106 and television, 105, 108, 110, 111 comScore, 63 Condé Nast, 116, 117 consolivision, 114, 115–21 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), 83 “cool,” meanings of, 41, 63 copyright infringement, 146–49 Coupland, Douglas, 107 Couric, Katie, 21 Cue, Eddy, 103 curation, 36 Cusack, John, 2 Dacron Republican-Democrat, The, 18, 167 Dauman, Philippe, 126 Deadline Hollywood, 25 Delphi, 118 Demand Media, 52 Denton, Nick, 193–94, 196, 197 Deutsch, Donny, 2 digital convergence, 107 digital media: and advertising, 18, 21, 24, 25, 52, 70, 76, 84–85, 87, 128, 130 audience for, 16–17, 49, 54, 74, 87 and bundling/unbundling, 174–78 bureaucracies of, 19, 24, 138, 199 changed business of, 194–200 circulations strategy of, 56–57 click fraud on, 26, 74 and content producers, 189–92 as distribution deal, 104, 194, 199 efficiency of, 195 forecasts for, 25–26 functionality of, 16, 17, 41, 166, 168 image-based, 157–58 inevitability of the new, 5, 10, 12, 14, 15 life expectancy of, 194 lowered value of, 52, 81, 190 as news outlet, 33, 58 and profitability, 15, 49, 66 promotion as chief function of, 56–58 as reinvention of media business, 42, 168, 194 revenue sources of, 43 and sports, 181–88 digital media (cont.) stalled market of, 58 technology view of, 3, 11, 17, 43, 152–53, 166 traffic sought by, 14, 52, 59, 86 transitory nature of, 23, 194 unregulated, 138 and user satisfaction, 18 as video, 97–98, 109, 139, 157–59, 169 vs. traditional, 1–5, 14, 40, 190–91 as wasteland, 190 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), 148 direct marketing, 55–56, 69–70, 86 Discovery Channel, 117 Disney, 60, 61, 102, 116, 117, 154, 185 dongle streaming device, 110, 111 dot-com crash, 65, 66, 134, 148 DoubleClick, 72 DSL, 133–34, 135 DVDs, 91–92, 111, 190 DVorkin, Lewis, 66–67 DVR, 83, 110, 146 entertainment businesses, 115, 142, 146, 168, 189–90, 192 ESPN, 95, 117, 120, 126, 127, 171, 184–85 Ethernet, 109 Everson, Carolyn, 40–41 Facebook, 86, 195 advertising on, 40–41, 161 and BuzzFeed, 59, 60, 102 News Feed, 33, 36–37, 157 rise of, 26, 117, 130–31 social strategy of, 52–53 and television, 157–62 as utility, 41, 42, 43 video on, 44, 158–62 FCC, 141–44, 174, 175 fiber optics, 135 Final Cut Pro, 62 Food Network, 21–22 Forbes, 57–58, 65–67, 161 Fox Broadcasting Company, 97 Fox Interactive Media, 20 Fox Network, 118, 120, 183, 185 Fox News Channel, 32, 35, 119 Freston, Tom, 62, 117, 126 Galloway, Scott, 99 Gannett, 116 Gawker media, 33, 193–97 generation gap, 13, 26 Godard, Jean-Luc, 31 Google, 42, 43, 52, 112 AdSense, 59 and Android, 102, 110 and digital vs. old media, 4, 40, 195 and DoubleClick, 72 income sources of, 26 and search engine wars, 15–16, 53 and sports, 181, 186 and traffic gaming, 59 and Yahoo, 16, 20 and YouTube, 1, 96, 147–49, 151–55, 158, 160 Google Chromecast, 110 Google News, 33 Greenfield, Richard, 96 Grey, Brad, 2 Guardian, The, 13 Hastings, Reed, 92–93, 98, 142, 187 HBO, 64, 95, 98, 100, 114, 117, 125, 126, 127, 130, 132, 171, 176, 177 Hearst, 61, 116, 117 Herzog, Doug, 2 Hirschhorn, Jason, 95 Hoffner, Jordon, 2 Holt, Dennis, 48 House of Cards, 94 Huffington, Arianna, 11–12, 34, 58–59 Huffington Post, The, 12, 18, 34, 58, 66, 189 Hughes, Chris, 196–97 Hulu, 5, 161 Icahn, Carl, 130, 132 information: bare minimum level of, 52 branding, 52 as currency, 32 personalized, 157, 158 real value of, 123 sources of, 52 surgical selection of, 51 too much, 35–36 transient nature of, 37 wanting to be free, 123, 124, 167, 189–90 intellectual property, 146–49, 194 Internet: bundling, 177–78 and cable, 125, 129, 130, 135 free, 123, 124, 139–41 moralistic intensity of, 191–92 “net neutrality,” 138–44 and OTT, 113 publishing, 65–66 and television, 91, 108, 111, 112, 139 two-speed, 143 and video, 26, 145, 159 Internet protocol (IP), 92, 94, 109, 110–11, 134 Jarvis, Jeff, 11 Jobs, Steve, 101–4, 105 Johansson, Scarlet, 2 journalists, technology, 10–11, 13 Kvamme, Mark, 2, 3 Kyncl, Robert, 96 Lauer, Matt, 21 Lerer, Ken, 11, 12, 58 Levinsohn, Ross, 20 licensing formats, 119–20, 126 LL Cool J, 2 Loeb, Dan, 19–20 magazines, 21, 56, 86, 104, 116 attention demands of, 71 CPMs, 52, 65, 66, 71–72, 73 production and distribution costs, 71 revenue sources, 48, 54, 115, 124 space limitations of, 72 Maker Studios, 154 Mann, Michael, 2 Martin, Laura, 175 Mayer, Marissa, 20–21 McCain, John, 174 McConaughey, Matthew, 2 McFee, Abigail, 27 McLuhan, Marshall, 107 media: advertising in, 18, 21, 52 and Apple, 101–3 audience for, 16–17, 40, 72 bundling/unbundling, 171–78 and consumer behavior, 12 content costs of, 165–67, 189 crossover executives in, 17, 20 deal-making in, 93 digital, see digital media disrupted paradigm of, 83 as entertainment, 31, 85 generation gap in, 13 hierarchical business of, 11 income sources for, 16 licensing and distribution, 104 low- vs. high-end, 85–88, 165, 187 and marketing, 64 mass, 39, 123, 195 as narrative, 31, 67 news outlets, 12, 18, 31–37 new world market for, 85 no-cost, 43 ownership trade-offs, 126–27 pirated, 146–49, 172 quest for new medium, 12 removing salesmen from, 76 and scarcity premium, 72, 76 and sports, 181–88 streaming media devices, 109–10 as television, 118, 121 traditional, value of, 4, 71 transformation of, 12–14 user-supported content, 127–28, 147–49, 190 as zero-sum game, 4, 23–24 media brand, 51 media business, 115–16 media buyer, 48 Microsoft, 16 Microsoft Xbox, 110 Milken, Michael, 11 Milner, Yuri, 43, 160 mobiles, 74, 102–3 Moonves, Les, 9–10, 12, 97, 131–32, 135–36 Morris, Kevin, 1–4 movies, 115, 123, 124, 146 MSN, 18, 33 MTV, 126, 130 Murdoch, Elisabeth, 119 Murdoch, James, 61, 119–20 Murdoch, Rupert, 103–4, 116–21 music industry, 1, 101–3, 146–47, 172, 173–74 Myspace, 20, 95, 117, 118 Napster, 146, 147 Nathanson, Michael, 25–26 NBC, 130, 132, 143, 160, 185 Netflix, 91–94, 97, 98–100, 139–40, 142–44, 155, 161, 169, 176, 177, 190 “net neutrality,” 138–44 Netscape, 39, 97 New Republic, The, 196–97 news: anchormen [-women] of, 35 as branding device, 59 declining value of, 34, 37, 168 economic triage of, 33 and elections, 59, 60 lower-cost, 32, 33, 35 media outlets for, 31–37, 58, 65 monetizing, 64 network, 35 as public good, 32 as reality, 31 repetitive, 33, 36 as storytelling, 31, 32 ubiquity of, 34 unprofitability of, 34, 35 and Vice, 63–64 News Corp, 20, 116, 117, 118 newspapers: attention demands of, 71 classified ads, 69, 115 consolidation of, 116 digital replacement of, 24–25, 167 entertainment supplements, 34 income sources of, 69, 124 local retailers publicized in, 115 nineteenth-century, 123 personalized, 33, 36–37 production and distribution costs, 71 space limitations of, 72 Web similarity to, 18, 33, 189 New Yorker, 94–100 New York magazine, 47, 48, 53, 61 New York Times, The, 12–13, 27, 35, 63, 73, 78, 165, 166 Nickelodeon, 95, 130 Nintendo Wii, 110 Oliver, John, 141 OTT (over-the-top) content venues, 84, 94, 100, 108, 109, 111–14, 130, 161, 175, 176–77 Outbrain, 53, 197 Paley, William, 160 Paramount Pictures, 2 Peretti, Jonah, 53, 58–59 pirated media, 146–49, 172 Pittman, Bob, 126 platform function, 93, 158, 161 Politico, 189 portal wars, 15 POTS (plain old telephone service), 135 programmatic buying, 73 publishing: business of, 55, 56, 115 Internet, 65–66 print, 66, 172 radio, 115, 116, 124 Redstone, Sumner, 121, 126, 147 Reilly, Kevin, 2 ReplayTV, 83 Roberts, Brian, 10 Rodman, Dennis, 64 Rogers Communications, 65 Roku, 109, 113 Rubicon Project, 75 Rutledge, Tom, 113 Saffo, Paul, 96–97 Sandberg, Sheryl, Lean In, 41 Scripps Networks, 21–22 search engine optimization (SEO), 51–53, 73 search engine wars, 15–16, 51, 53 Sears, Jay, 75–76, 80 Semel, Terry, 17 Sequoia Capital, 2 Showtime, 98, 177 60 Minutes, 64 smart phones, 105–6, 110, 111 smart TVs, 111, 113 Smith, Ben, 23 Smith, Shane, 62, 63–65 Snyder, Gabriel, 197 social media, 56–57, 62, 73, 158 Sony PlayStation, 110 Sorrell, Martin, 61, 99 South Park, 64 Spacey, Kevin, 94 sports events, 85, 181–88 Starz, 92, 93 Stewart, Adam, 2 Stone, Matt, 2, 4, 5 storytelling, 16, 31–32, 152, 190, 191, 199 Super Bowl, 23, 85 Supreme Court, U.S., 112 Swisher, Kara, 11 tablets, 103–6, 111 TCV, 61, 63 telephone companies (telcos), 135, 140–41, 177 television: advertising on, 24, 25, 40, 70, 79–80, 83–84, 99–100, 115, 119, 125, 129 anti-television views, 39–40 attention demands of, 71 as box, 107–8, 111, 113–14 broadcast, 108, 112, 132, 168 and bundling/unbundling, 173–75 cable networks, 95–96, 99–100, 109, 119, 124–25, 131–32, 139, 172, 184 comparisons with, 39, 167, 191–92, 197–98 and computers, 105, 108, 110, 111 deadwood on, 19 digital’s perceived threat to, 23, 25–27, 42–43 as distribution channel, 28, 94 entertainment, 111, 114, 190 evolution of, 190, 197–99 expanding, 94–96, 99–100, 107, 111–12, 120, 124, 132 and Facebook, 157–62 and family values, 191 free, 123 geographical organization of, 92 golden age of, 172 government regulation of, 137–38, 175 HDMI port, 110 income sources of, 24, 25, 28, 85, 93, 96, 99–100, 115, 117 and Internet, 91, 108, 111, 112, 139 licensing deals, 93, 97, 112, 126 as model, 21, 28, 58, 59, 64–65, 99–100, 114, 118, 168, 198 and Netflix, 91, 93–94 networks, 47, 64, 80, 131 pay for, 113, 124–28 prime time, 79–81, 96 profitability of, 4, 24 programming schedule, 83, 114, 128 ratings wars, 183 reality, 111–12, 191 as reborn industry, 96, 132, 191–92, 199 share price multiple, 40 smart TVs, 111, 113 and sports, 181–88 steady, old-fashioned nature of, 9–10, 24, 27 and storytelling, 16, 190, 191, 199 syndication, 96, 176 undifferentiated inventory supply, 79 value of, 85, 121, 198–99 and video, 96–97, 98, 108–9, 141–42, 145–46, 152–55, 158, 165–69 Thompson, Scott, 19 Time Inc., 159 Time Warner, 11, 61, 64–65, 116, 117, 119–21, 126, 130, 132, 159 Time Warner Cable (TWC), 120, 130, 135–36, 143, 185 TiVo, 83, 110 traffic: aggregation methods, 18–19, 50–51, 59, 66, 190, 195–96 audience as, 18–19, 49–53 exchanges of, 53 pumping, 73 traffic arbitrage, 52, 66 traffic loop aggregators, 73 transcendence, 42 transformation: inevitability of, 10, 12–13 print to digital, 65–67 as shell game, 66 Tribune, 116 True/Slant, 66–67 Turner, Ted, 126, 127 Turner Broadcasting, 117, 126, 127, 130, 132 21st Century Fox, 61, 118–21, 126 Twitter, 26, 33 unbundling, 171–78 utilities, 41–42 Verizon FiOS, 97, 135, 177 Viacom, 3, 116, 117, 118, 121, 126, 129, 130, 131, 147–49, 152 Vice, 57–58, 61–65, 67 video: ads on, 63, 158, 167 amateur (cheap), 167 and BuzzFeed.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

., Universal Studios, MGM, and Paramount Pictures. Soon after that, the major studios stopped licensing films to Intertainer, and the service was forced to close down. This broke my heart, and I refused to take it lying down. In September of 2002, Intertainer filed an antitrust suit against three major entertainment companies, AOL Time Warner, Vivendi Universal, and Sony as well as their wholly owned service Movielink in the United States District Court for the Central District of California, Western Division, accusing them of conspiracy to fix prices in the digital distribution of entertainment and restraint of trade. In March of 2006, the defendants reached an out-of-court settlement with Intertainer.

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, business logic, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, dark matter, desegregation, digital divide, East Village, Eben Moglen, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, George Gilder, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, machine readable, Mahbub ul Haq, market bubble, market clearing, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, random walk, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, software patent, spectrum auction, subscription business, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, work culture , Yochai Benkler

The most prominent decision came out of Portland, Oregon, where the Federal Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that broadband was part information service and part telecommunications service, but not a cable service. The FCC, not the cable franchising authority, had power to regulate it. 161 At the same time, as part of the approval of the AOL-Time Warner merger, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) required the new company to give at least three competitors open access to its broadband facilities, should AOL be offered cable broadband facilities over Time Warner. 707 The AOL-Time Warner merger requirements, along with the Ninth Circuit's finding that cable broadband included a telecommunications component, seemed to indicate that cable broadband transport would come to be treated as a common carrier.

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

That experience is now chalked up as among the most insane flights of fancy in business history and an unmitigated disaster for the media giants, who acted as if they had only a matter of months until the Internet destroyed them. Some of the digital ventures they invested in were laughably implausible. The nadir came in January 2000 when the AOL–Time Warner merger was announced; AOL was the dominant partner in the deal even though it had just a smidgen of Time Warner’s assets, sales, or profits. What AOL had was a mother lode of world-class hype. It soon became clear that once the Internet shifted from dial-up to broadband, AOL had no business model and was next to worthless.141 How could Time Warner, the mightiest of the mighty media conglomerates, have missed something so elementary? Despite the hit to corporate balance sheets due to the Internet bubble, in 2000 commercial media markets remained lucrative, and the immediate future looked just fine, especially for the Hollywood-based conglomerates.

…

Pulse does not generate original news, and its founders concede that they don’t know much about journalism.86 Nor do any of the other mobile aggregators generate any original journalism,87 but some of their revenues will probably end up in the hands of other news media and may eventually contribute to paying actual journalists. The journalism company that has made the greatest impact online has been AOL, which was tenuously married to Time Warner for a decade until it went independent again in 2009. AOL purchased Patch around then, to be a “hyperlocal” digital news service, with branches in some 860 communities, supported by advertising. In other words, it would be like a digital newspaper but without the massive production expenses.

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification by Paul Roberts

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, business cycle, business process, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, double helix, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, impulse control, income inequality, inflation targeting, insecure affluence, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge worker, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, performance metric, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the long tail, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, value engineering, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

Lydia Depillis, “Congrats, CEOs! You’re Making 273 Times the Pay of the Average Worker,” Wonkblog, Washington Post, June 26, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/26/congrats-ceos-youre-making-273-times-the-pay-of-the-average-worker/. 37. Ahmed Abuiliazeed and Al-Motaz Bellah Al-Agamawi, “AOL Time Warner Merger: Case Analysis, Strategic Management of Technology,” SlideShare, http://www.slideshare.net/magamawi/aol-time-warnercase-analysis. 38. A. Rappaport, et al., “Stock or Cash: The Trade-offs for Buyers and Sellers in Mergers and Acquisitions,” Harvard Business Review, Nov.-Dec. 1999, p. 147. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/law/pg/offer/llm/iel/mas_sample__lecture.pdf 39.

The Quants by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, automated trading system, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, index fund, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, job automation, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kickstarter, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Mercer, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, yield curve, éminence grise

Few traders would be as well versed at it as Weinstein, who began putting together one of the most successful and powerful credit derivatives trading outfits on Wall Street. By 2002, the economy was in a ditch. With formerly blue chip companies such as Enron and WorldCom unraveling, the worry was that anything could happen. Investors started feeling anxious about the largest media company in the world at the time, AOL Time Warner. Debt holders, especially, were panicking, while the stock was down less than 20 percent. One day Weinstein was strolling past AOL’s headquarters near Rockefeller Center. Thinking several steps into the future, much like a chess player plotting his strategy multiple moves in advance, he realized that while the stock had fallen about 20 percent, the collapse in its bond prices was far too severe, as if the company were on the verge of bankruptcy.

…

Such a catastrophe was unlikely for a company with so many long-standing, relatively profitable businesses, including the television networks CNN and HBO. Deciding that the company had a good chance of surviving the turmoil, he purchased AOL bonds while shorting the stock to hedge the position. The bet turned into a huge home run as the bond market, and AOL (now simply Time Warner), recovered. Gambling became a way of life for Weinstein’s crew. One of his first hires was Bing Wang, who went on to finish in thirty-fourth place in the World Series of Poker in 2005. Weinstein learned that several traders at Deutsche were members of MIT’s secretive blackjack team. He was soon joining them a few times a year to hit the blackjack tables in Las Vegas, deploying the skills he’d learned reading Thorp’s Beat the Dealer in college.

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power by Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, David B. Yoffie

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, general purpose technology, gig economy, Google Chrome, GPS: selective availability, Greyball, independent contractor, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Metcalfe’s law, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Network effects, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, web application, zero-sum game

But before heading down this path, it is important to recognize that buying your way into the platform world is fraught with danger. The skills to manage a platform can be antithetical to managing an old command-and-control organization. Notable disasters have included News Corporation’s acquisition of MySpace and the AOL-Time-Warner merger. Yet under the right conditions, buying a platform may be the right answer. In businesses where new, emerging platforms are likely to capture a significant share (e.g., taxis and retail), incumbent firms cannot sit on the sidelines indefinitely. In general, the biggest risk in acquiring a platform has been not retaining key talent, integrating technology into legacy systems, and cultural rejection from the parent.

More Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Black Swan, Build a better mousetrap, business process, call centre, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, Dennis Ritchie, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, functional programming, George Gilder, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, lolcat, low cost airline, Mars Rover, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, performance metric, place-making, price discrimination, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Oldenburg, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, The Great Good Place, The Soul of a New Machine, Tragedy of the Commons, type inference, unpaid internship, wage slave, web application, Y Combinator

Because the more people you added to that team, the more likely they would be to have one real grump who thought it was unprofessional and immature to write “Most things actually work!” on your web site. Not to mention the comment, “Winamp 3: Almost as new as Winamp 2!” That kind of stuff is what made us love Winamp. By the time AOL Time Warner Corporate Weenieheads got their hands on that thing, the funny stuff from the web site was gone. You can just see them, fuming and festering and snivelling like Salieri in the movie Amadeus, trying to beat down all signs of creativity that might scare one old lady in Minnesota, at the cost of wiping out anything that might have made people like the product.

Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower by William Blum

anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, collective bargaining, Columbine, disinformation, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, it's over 9,000, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing

. • NBC is canceling an appearance by a nuclear activist because she has criticized General Electric, which owns the network. Another nuclear activist or author, or opponent of military spending, is unwelcome at CBS because it belongs to Westinghouse; while yet another finds doors closed at ABC because of having treated the Disney conglomerate with less than reverence; ditto at CNN, owned by the AOL-Time-Warner octopus; while the advertisers are increasingly influencing the content of the news stories. (As A. J. Liebling famously wrote: "If you want freedom of the press, you have to own one.") • During a new US invasion abroad, the media is being severely restricted as to what it can report to the American people about the war; reporters are required to submit their copy to the Pentagon censor, and are told where they can go, what they can film, who they can interview; those who don't toe the line are transferred by their employer under heavy Pentagon pressure. • The FBI is placing ads in Vietnamese-language and Russian-language newspapers in the US asking immigrants to report on suspected spies amongst their numbers. • A prison inmate's sacramental confession to a Catholic priest is surreptitiously being taped by prison officials.

Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language by Robert McCrum

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, colonial rule, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, invention of movable type, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, knowledge economy, Livingstone, I presume, Martin Wolf, Naomi Klein, Norman Mailer, Parag Khanna, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile

So of course there will be the Discovery Channel and Kids’ Corner with its hours of Tom and Jerry, but there is another channel, Potpourri, broadcasting in Malayalam. In China, the state-run broadcaster CCTV and the provincial and municipal stations offer a total of about 2,100 channels and the availability of non-domestic television is limited. AOL Time Warner, News Corp and Phoenix TV (based in Hong Kong) are allowed to transmit via cable in Guangdong province. In Africa, there is the example of Ghana: the television transmits in English because that is the national language. Local radio, however broadcasts in local dialects (twee, eweh and gah) and some local television programmes are extremely idiosyncratic.

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, card file, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, democratizing finance, Dennis Tito, discovery of the americas, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, impulse control, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Nikolai Kondratiev, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, pushing on a string, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stocks for the long run, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile, Yogi Berra

Agee, James, 220 agricultural markets, 39–40, 93, 145 Akerlof, George, 181, 187 Alchian, Armen, 93, 250 Alexander, Sidney, 72 Allais, Maurice, 77 Allen, Roy, 64 American Bankers Association, 318 American Economic Association, 42, 183, 288 American Finance Association (AFA), 104, 105–6, 198, 201–2, 247, 274, 284 American Mathematical Association, 216–17 American National Bank, 128, 140–41 American Statistical Association, 17 Analysts Journal, 118 Analytic Investment Management, 218 “Anomalous Evidence Regarding Market Efficiency” (Jensen), 205 AOL-Time Warner merger, 267 “Application of the Efficient Market Model to U.S. Treasury Bills” (Roll), 103 AQR Capital Management, 260 arbitrage and Buffett, 222 described, 116 and fund management, 225–26 and indexes, 230–31 limits of, 254–55, 280–81 and Merton, 148 and misinformation, 299–300 and “noise traders,” 252 and options, 220, 283 and the rational market hypothesis, 192 and S&P 500 mispricings, 249–50 and the tech bubble, 262 and value investing, 117 Aristotle, 30 Arrow, Kenneth, 77–78, 149–50, 181, 183, 198, 237, 302–4, 305, 344n. 9, 358n. 19, 322 Arthur, Brian, 303–5 Arthur D.

The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise by Eric Ries

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Ben Horowitz, billion-dollar mistake, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, connected car, corporate governance, DevOps, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, hockey-stick growth, index card, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loss aversion, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, move fast and break things, obamacare, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, place-making, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Uber for X, universal basic income, web of trust, Y Combinator

Clark Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School “To succeed in the Third Wave, an era where technology will disrupt everything from education to healthcare, companies will need new tools and approaches. Eric Ries provides a road map for companies on how to use entrepreneurial principles to achieve transformational growth.” —Steve Case, former chairman of AOL Time Warner and author of the New York Times bestseller The Third Wave “The Startup Way creates a vision and blueprint for a new form of management that combines entrepreneurial and general management skills and practices. The inspirational examples across multiple, diverse organizations show that integrating the highly iterative, experimental mindset and skills of startups into established organizations is key to unlocking continuous innovation and sustainable growth….Provides clear and useful guidance for tackling the toughest challenges.

Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, + Website by Matt Blumberg

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airport security, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Ben Horowitz, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Broken windows theory, crowdsourcing, deskilling, fear of failure, financial engineering, high batting average, high net worth, hiring and firing, Inbox Zero, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, pattern recognition, performance metric, pets.com, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype

For very small companies, diversifying can be particularly tricky, but if you have a partial solution and adding some new technology or products give you a whole solution, it may make a lot of sense. Focusing As much success as we’ve had with some of our acquisitions, our experience at Return Path has proven that the road to hell is paved with failed diversification strategies. The AOL/Time Warner merger is probably the most famous example: “convergence” never materialized and both companies came close to failing. Even with that counterexample staring us in the face, we tried the convergence route at Return Path—and it almost brought down our company. When Return Path first made the transition from startup to scaling, the story we told was all about diversification and convergence.

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

target=apps..social. 167 less than 1% of worldwide smartphone sales: Gartner, “Gartner Says Worldwide Smartphone Sales Grew 3.9 Percent in First Quarter of 2016,” May 19, 2016, table 2, https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3323017. 167 “Microsoft’s Nokia experiment is over”: Tom Warren, “Microsoft Lays Off Hundreds as It Guts Its Phone Business,” Verge, May 25, 2016, http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/25/11766344/microsoft-nokia-impairment-layoffs-may-2016. 168 more than 20,000 layoffs: ZDNet, “Worst Tech Mergers and Acquisitions: Nokia and Microsoft, AOL and Time Warner,” Between the Lines (blog), February 13, 2016, http://www.zdnet.com/article/worst-tech-mergers-and-acquisitions-nokia-and-microsoft-aol-and-time-warner. 168 almost $8 billion in write-downs: Nick Wingfield, “Cutting Jobs, Micro-soft Turns Page on Nokia Deal,” New York Times, July 8, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/09/technology/microsoft-layoffs.html. 168 the largest in Microsoft history: Gregg Keizer, “Microsoft Writes Off $7.6B, Admits Failure of Nokia Acquisition,” Computerworld, July 8, 2015, http://www.computerworld.com/article/2945371/smartphones/microsoft-writes-off-76b-admits-failure-of-nokia-acquisition.html. 168 By 2009, the BlackBerry operating system powered 20%: Statista, “Global Smartphone OS Market Share Held by RIM (BlackBerry) from 2007 to 2016, by Quarter,” accessed February 5, 2017, https://www.statista.com/statistics/263439/global-market-share-held-by-rim-smartphones. 168 By the end of 2016 the company had announced: Andrew Griffin, “BlackBerry Announces It Will Make No More New Phones,” Independent, September 28, 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/blackberry-announces-it-will-make-no-more-new-phones-a7334911.html. 168 saw its market value drop below $4 billion: Google Finance, “BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY),” accessed February 5, 2017, https://www.google.com/finance?

Website Optimization by Andrew B. King

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, bounce rate, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, information retrieval, iterative process, Kickstarter, machine readable, medical malpractice, Network effects, OSI model, performance metric, power law, satellite internet, search engine result page, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social bookmarking, social graph, Steve Jobs, the long tail, three-martini lunch, traumatic brain injury, web application

User Interface Library), Relying on Ajax Libraries, Relying on Ajax Libraries, The Location Hash Technique YUI Compressor, Bundle Your Scripts, JavaScript Optimization and Packing Z ZLIB compression algorithm, Using HTTP Compression About the Author Andrew B. King is the President of Website Optimization, LLC, a Web Performance and Search Engine Marketing firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Since 2002, team WSO has helped firms optimize the effectiveness of their websites to improve their ROI. Their clients include Bank of America, AOL, Time Warner, Net Zero, WhitePages.com, and Caravan Tours. For more information on website optimization and a book companion site go to: http://www.websiteoptimization.com. Andy is the author of Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization, a highly regarded book on web site performance tuning and search engine optimization.

Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners by Larry Harris

active measures, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, automated trading system, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, compound rate of return, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, data acquisition, diversified portfolio, equity risk premium, fault tolerance, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, High speed trading, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, invention of the telegraph, job automation, junk bonds, law of one price, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, market fragmentation, market friction, market microstructure, money market fund, Myron Scholes, National best bid and offer, Nick Leeson, open economy, passive investing, pattern recognition, payment for order flow, Ponzi scheme, post-materialism, price discovery process, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent-seeking, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, search costs, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, Small Order Execution System, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, survivorship bias, the market place, transaction costs, two-sided market, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

When applied to market structure, these two slogans promote the two different competitions that take place in the trading industry. The first slogan promotes the competition of traders to find the best price, and the second promotes the competition among market centers to provide the best services. ◀ * * * * * * ▶ Where Is the Market for AOL? AOL Time Warner common stock trades in each of the following market centers: • The New York Stock Exchange, its primary listing market • All U.S. regional exchanges: Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Pacific, and Philadelphia • Most ECNs and alternative trading systems. The most important of these are Island, Instinet, REDIBook, Archipelago, Bloomberg Tradebook, BRUT, and POSIT

…

See Association for Investment Management and Research air pollution, 213 all-or-none order, 83 alternative trading systems (ATSs), 49 American depository receipts (ADRs), 40, 66 American Stock Exchange hand signals, 104 listed stocks, 48 Major Market Index, 485 specialists, 495 American-style option, 42 analytic risk. See model risk animateurs, 495 AOL Time Warner, 525, 536 application programming interface, 536 arbitrage, 347–79 conversion, 351, 354–56 crossed markets, 375 delivery, 350, 353 equilibrium spreads, 377–78 index, 563, 577, 580 opportunities, 373–75 pairs trading, 358–60 pure, 350–56 quantity characterization, 375–76 risks, 357, 360, 362–73 shipping, 350, 351–53 simple characterization, 349–50 speculative, 356–63 statistical, 360 terminology, 348–49 types of, 350–63 See also arbitrageurs arbitrage numerator, 348 arbitrage opportunity, 348 arbitrage spread, 349, 377–78 arbitrageurs, 185, 243 competition among, 377–78 and dealers and brokers, 376–77 definition of, 6, 194, 232, 347, 348, 404 fixed-income, 40 as liquidity porters, 404, 406, 534 and October 1987 crash, 563 statistical, 194, 360 trading style and strategies, 196, 226, 232–35 types of, 194 See also arbitrage Archer Daniel Midlands Company, 147 Archipelago Exchange, 35, 49, 97, 306, 543 Arizona Stock Exchange, 121, 543 Asian markets, 53, 57, 90, 253 ask price, 5, 69, 280, 295 ask size, 281 asset, 178, 180, 254 asset bubble, 254 asset exchanger, 6, 33, 181–82, 193, 214, 252 Association for Investment Management and Research (AIMR), 65, 66, 448 asymmetrically informed trader, 299, 310 asymmetric information, 7, 312, 314–15, 323, 326–27, 332, 531–32 AT&T, 11–14 ATM-fit currency, 182 at parity order, 117 ATSs.

A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers by Lawrence G. Mcdonald, Patrick Robinson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, diversification, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, hiring and firing, if you build it, they will come, it's over 9,000, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, naked short selling, negative equity, new economy, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, value at risk

Our own online poll of global users wouldn’t give five bucks for ’em.” Before I hung up on him, I added, “And you know it. So you can stop bullshitting me.” We both sensed we had Morgan Stanley on the wrong foot. At this time, there were Internet mergers and acquisitions all over the marketplace, like AOL Time Warner. And pretty soon there was a rumor that Union Bank of Switzerland was trying to buy us. The story broke in a couple of publications, and when it did, we thought that would really unnerve Morgan Stanley, who probably foresaw it would be difficult to market any convertible bond without our stamp of approval.

The Billionaire and the Mechanic: How Larry Ellison and a Car Mechanic Teamed Up to Win Sailing's Greatest Race, the Americas Cup, Twice by Julian Guthrie

AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Benchmark Capital, Boeing 747, cloud computing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, fear of failure, Ford paid five dollars a day, independent contractor, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Maui Hawaii, new economy, pets.com, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, warehouse automation, white picket fence, Yogi Berra

The market could be wildly wrong for a few years but usually got it right over the long term. He recounted how in the early 1980s he talked to Michael Dell about the proliferation of PC companies that seemed to pop up out of nowhere and were gone a year later. More recently, in the dot-com heyday and shortly after the AOL–Time Warner merger, he got a call from Farzad Nazem, who used to work at Oracle and was now a top executive at Yahoo. Nazem told Larry, “Disney wants to merge with us. Why would we ever want to do something like that? What have they got?” Larry answered his old friend, “Gee, let me think. They have the most valuable film library in the world, the most valuable TV channels in world, and successful theme parks everywhere.

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, book scanning, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business intelligence, call centre, commoditize, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, Googley, gravity well, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John Markoff, Kickstarter, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, microcredit, music of the spheres, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, performance metric, pets.com, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, second-price auction, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, stem cell, Superbowl ad, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, The Turner Diaries, Y2K

[back] *** * Mark Sweeney, Revolutionmagazine.com, January 23, 2002, www.brandrepublic.com/news/ 135039. [back] *** * "Margins may tell Overture Story," TheStreet.com, February 19, 2002. [back] *** * AOL sounded like "Aloha," hence the nickname. [back] *** * For more on AOL's culture of negotiation, see Alec Klein, Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner (Simon and Schuster, 2003). [back] *** * http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum10003/3089.htm. [back] *** * Inktomi did have an extensive "paid inclusion" program that allowed websites to ensure they showed up in search results. [back] *** * http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/search/article_display.jsp?

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

AOL didn’t actually succeed in transforming itself from the dominant company of the dial-up networking era into the leader of the commercial Internet, but the expectation that it would be able to do so made it possible for it to buy Time Warner, a company many times its size in the real market of goods and services. The AOL Time Warner merger was a colossal disaster, and the value of the combined company was eventually written down from a peak of $226 billion to less than $20 billion. It is not inconceivable that the same could happen to a company like Uber, whose purchase of self-driving truck startup Otto was as much a signal to investors as it was an investment in the actual development of self-driving trucks and cars.

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change by Bharat Anand

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Eyjafjallajökull, fulfillment center, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, managed futures, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Minecraft, multi-sided market, Network effects, post-work, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, two-sided market, ubercab, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

THE PUZZLE OF VERTICAL INTEGRATION Vertical integration refers to the combination of content and distribution. The idea has long been a lightning rod in the entertainment industry. The recent rush was triggered by vertical combinations between TV studios and broadcast networks—20th Century Fox and Fox Broadcasting Corporation in 1986, ABC and Disney in 1996—and continued with megamergers since: AOL–Time Warner in 2000, Comcast–NBC Universal in 2009. Oddly, just as vertical mergers began finding favor with industry players and their bankers, criticism of them deepened. Why? Consider the canonical scenario: a distributor or a TV network buys a production studio. The conventional arguments for vertical integration go something like this: When a distributor buys upstream content, it can better control programming costs (if a cable operator bought ESPN, it could avoid continual renegotiations over subscriber charges).

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, Airbnb, airport security, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, congestion charging, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, drone strike, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, failed state, fault tolerance, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, national security letter, Network effects, Occupy movement, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, RFID, Ross Ulbricht, satellite internet, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, South China Sea, sparse data, stealth mode startup, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, unit 8200, urban planning, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero day

Think again,” Toronto Star, http://www.commercialalert.org/issues/culture/search-engines/so-you-thought-search-engines-offer-up-neutral-results-think-again. search engines visually differentiated: Gary Ruskin (16 Jul 2001), Letter to Donald Clark, US Federal Trade Commission, re: Deceptive advertising complaint against AltaVista Co., AOL Time Warner Inc., Direct Hit Technologies, iWon Inc., LookSmart Ltd., Microsoft Corp. and Terra Lycos S.A., Commercial Alert, http://www.commercialalert.org/PDFs/SearchEngines.pdf. Heather Hippsley (27 Jun 2002), Letter to Gary Ruskin re: Complaint requesting investigation of various Internet search engine companies for paid placement and paid inclusion programs, US Federal Trade Commission, http://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/closing_letters/commercial-alert-response-letter/commercialalertletter.pdf.

The City and the Stars / The Sands of Mars by Arthur C. Clarke

AOL-Time Warner, British Empire, Colonization of Mars, hydroponic farming, Mercator projection, Stephen Hawking

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. Aspect® name and logo are registered trademarks of Warner Books, Inc. For information address Warner Books, 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. An AOL Time Warner Company ISBN 0-7595-4575-8 A trade paperback edition of this book was published in 2001 by Warner Books. First eBook edition: September 2001 Visit our Web site at www.iPublish.com To the memory of Val Cleaver And Johnnie Maxwell, Who listened patiently through Many versions of this tale THE CITY AND THE STARS INTRODUCTION It is a matter of great satisfaction to me that The City and the Stars has been continuously in print ever since its first publication in 1956.

Bernie Madoff, the Wizard of Lies: Inside the Infamous $65 Billion Swindle by Diana B. Henriques

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, British Empire, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, corporate raider, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial thriller, fixed income, forensic accounting, Gordon Gekko, index fund, locking in a profit, low interest rates, mail merge, merger arbitrage, messenger bag, money market fund, payment for order flow, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, proprietary trading, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, riskless arbitrage, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, short squeeze, Small Order Execution System, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, transaction costs, traveling salesman

Far from resenting any implied suspicions, Madoff encouraged Tucker on this occasion to be sceptical, to verify the trading being conducted for the Fairfield Sentry fund. Tucker was shown an official-looking “purchase and sale blotter” showing a record of each trade for his funds. Then he was shown a journal that supposedly contained stock records for the Madoff firm. “Pick any two stocks,” Madoff said. Any two? Tucker first picked AOL Time Warner, which he knew was among the Sentry fund’s holdings. Meanwhile, either Frank or Bernie had activated the computer screen, explaining that it would provide a live feed to Madoff’s account at the DTCC. “They continued to move pages of the screen until they got to the AOL page,” Tucker recalled.

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Fred Vogelstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, cloud computing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Dynabook, Firefox, General Magic , Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Googley, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Neil Armstrong, Palm Treo, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software patent, SpaceShipOne, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, web application, zero-sum game

For two decades—the 1980s and 1990s—a procession of celebrated media executives marshaled the best technology they could assemble to position themselves for the new world they saw coming. They spent hundreds of billions of dollars buying one another to bulk up. But their timing was so off, their innovations were so bad, and their mergers were so disastrous—such as AOL’s purchase of Time Warner in 2001—that by 2005 convergence had become a discredited idea, and few dared to mention the word. Where did all these very smart and very wealthy people go wrong? They had the wrong devices in mind. The media and communications tycoons all predicted that the convergence would happen on the personal computer—that their equipment supplying television programming, such as set-top boxes, would ultimately control our personal computers too.

…

Just as that was happening, the company shelled out $7 billion to buy Turner Broadcasting, owners of CNN and a giant movie library. Long before that deal could pay off, the conglomerate agreed to sell itself to America Online in 2000, at the peak of the Internet bubble, for $164 billion in AOL stock. By 2009, when the company finally divested itself of AOL, owners of Time Warner shares in 2000 had seen the value of their holdings reduced to eighteen cents on the dollar. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, media/technology convergence had been so discredited that mentioning it at conferences could make executives wince visibly. All this flailing on both sides of the convergence equation actually made it seem less, not more, likely for it to happen cooperatively.

Stocks for the Long Run 5/E: the Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies by Jeremy Siegel

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, carried interest, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, computer age, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, fundamental attribution error, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, joint-stock company, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, machine readable, market bubble, mental accounting, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Northern Rock, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uptick rule, Vanguard fund

But that capital gain was never recorded in the S&P earnings data. In 2002, after the Internet bubble popped, Time Warner was forced to write down its investment in AOL by $99 billion, at that time the largest loss ever recorded by an American corporation. The combined profits and market value of AOL and Time Warner were not materially different after the tech bubble than before, but because the capital gain on AOL shares was never included as earnings, the aggregate earnings of the S&P 500 Index fell dramatically when AOL’s market price tumbled. Many other firms during that period also took large write-downs on acquired assets while the profits realized by the acquired firm upon purchase were never recorded.

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery by Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Curtis, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job polarisation, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, proprietary trading, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population

In 2005, despite earlier promises, it closed Terry’s factory at York— where it made the chocolate orange—with the loss of 316 jobs. Production was moved to cheaper facilities in Sweden, Belgium, Poland and Slovakia. Many deals have failed spectacularly, leading to both wealth transfer and destruction. The merger of AOL and Time Warner in 2001 led to some of the largest losses in corporate history. The Royal Bank of Scotland’s takeover of ABM Amro in 2007 was to have disastrous consequences for the bank, its staff, shareholders and customers and the British taxpayer. One study of the impact of recent mergers in the UK, US and continental Europe concluded that ‘shareholders of acquirers experience wealth losses on average or at best break even… The odds of positive and significant value creation for acquirer shareholders may even be less than 50 per cent, which is what you would get with the toss of a fair coin.’

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, Greenspan put, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index fund, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, NetJets, new economy, New Journalism, North Sea oil, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Plato's cave, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, tontine, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

The audience settled into its chairs to hear Andy Grove, head of Intel, kick off the morning with “Internet Interrupted.” Then Diane Sawyer moderated a panel, asking Meg Whitman of eBay; Sir Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony; and AOL Time Warner’s Steve Case “Pulse of America: How Do You Find It?” Sun Valley frothed and bubbled like a junior high school cafeteria being filmed for a documentary, with reporters round-robining rumors that USA Networks, or AOL Time Warner, or Disney, or Charter Communications, or some combination of them, were going to hook up with AT&T Broadband.13 Many of those present wished the television tents would disappear.

Principles of Corporate Finance by Richard A. Brealey, Stewart C. Myers, Franklin Allen

3Com Palm IPO, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Boeing 747, book value, break the buck, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, compound rate of return, computerized trading, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, currency risk, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, equity premium, equity risk premium, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, fudge factor, German hyperinflation, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate swap, inventory management, Iridium satellite, James Webb Space Telescope, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Larry Ellison, law of one price, linear programming, Livingstone, I presume, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, market friction, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the rule of 72, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, VA Linux, value at risk, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game, Zipcar

When a firm’s stock price is swept upward in a bubble, CEOs and financial managers are tempted to acquire another firm using the stock as currency. One extreme example where this arguably happened is AOL’s acquisition of Time Warner at the height of the dot.com bubble in 2000. AOL was a classic dot.com company. Its stock rose from $2.34 at the end of 1995 to $75.88 at the end of 1999. Time Warner’s stock price also increased during this period, but only from $18.94 to $72.31. AOL’s total market capitalization was a small fraction of Time Warner’s in 1995, but overtook Time Warner’s in 1998. By the end of 1999 AOL’s outstanding shares were worth $173 billion, compared with Time Warner’s $95 billion. AOL managed to complete the acquisition before the Internet bubble burst.

…

AOL managed to complete the acquisition before the Internet bubble burst. AOL-Time Warner’s stock then plummeted, but not by nearly as much as the stocks of dot.com companies that had not managed to find and acquire safer partners.36 ● ● ● ● ● SUMMARY The patron saint of the Bolsa (stock exchange) in Barcelona, Spain, is Nuestra Señora de la Esperanza—Our Lady of Hope. She is the perfect patroness, for we all hope for superior returns when we invest. But competition between investors will tend to produce an efficient market. In such a market, prices will rapidly impound any new information, and it will be difficult to make consistently superior returns.

…

With these distinctions in mind, we are about to consider motives for mergers, that is, reasons why two firms may be worth more together than apart. We proceed with some trepidation. The motives, though they often lead the way to real benefits, are sometimes just mirages that tempt unwary or overconfident managers into takeover disasters. This was the case for AOL, which spent a record-breaking $156 billion to acquire Time Warner. The aim was to create a company that could offer consumers a comprehensive package of media and information products. It didn’t work. Even more embarrassing was the acquisition by Hewlett Packard of Autonomy, a British software company. The purchase was made in October 2011 for $11.1 billion.

Propaganda and the Public Mind by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, deindustrialization, digital divide, European colonialism, experimental subject, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, interchangeable parts, language acquisition, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, one-state solution, precautionary principle, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, Thomas L Friedman, Tobin tax, Washington Consensus

Norman Solomon, a media critic, pointed out in a column that in the early 1990s, while the system was still under government control, the Internet was commonly referred to as an “information superhighway.”16 In the late 1990s, after it was handed over as a gift to private corporations in some manner that nobody knows, it’s become e-commerce, not an information superhighway. The megamergers like AOL and Time Warner offer technical possibilities to ensure that getting on the Internet will draw you into what they want you to see, not what you want to see. That’s very dangerous. The Internet is a tremendous tool for information, understanding, organizing, and communication. There is no doubt at all that the business world, which has been given this public gift, intends to turn it into something else.

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

Technology companies, cable providers, and Hollywood are happy to agree, insisting that the means smaller governments employ to maintain their cultural distinctiveness—production subsidies, broadcast quotas, spending rules, selective taxes and levies, and national ownership—are no longer needed because “spectrum scarcity,” long the leading justification for investment in public media and protectionist cultural policies, does not exist online.13 On the Internet the “dial is infinite,” to quote Jacob Glick, Google Canada’s policy counsel.14 Yet the infinite dial means that countries at a disadvantage in terms of population and GDP will find themselves using Web sites promoted by a handful of big Silicon Valley players and swamped by ready-made American culture.15 What technology boosters ignore is the fact that the steady erosion of regulation and checks on corporate power was a major factor in the development of the “old model” they so vociferously decry. For example, it was the 1996 Telecommunications Act (the “coup de grace of media deregulation”) that reduced the number of telephone service providers, unleashed a torrent of mergers and acquisitions that culminated in the ill-fated marriage of AOL and Time Warner, and opened the way for Clear Channel’s dramatic takeover of commercial radio. Without intervention, we will find our options similarly diminished in the digital realm. There is no such thing as a public Internet: everything flows through private pipes. However, using the Internet for the consumption of culture or to search for information is nearly as essential to participating in modern life as having electricity or plumbing in your home (try going to school or applying for a job without it).

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles by William Quinn, John D. Turner

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, debt deflation, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, government statistician, Greenspan put, high-speed rail, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, light touch regulation, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Right to Buy, Robert Shiller, Shenzhen special economic zone , short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, the built environment, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban planning

For internet stocks, the picture is even more remarkable: the sector experienced returns of 1,000 per cent in the 2 years preceding February 2000, and had lost all of these gains by the end of 2000.35 Some of the failures were spectacular. Webvan, an online grocery delivery service, saw its market capitalisation fall from $3.1 billion to zero in 18 months. VerticalNet, which provided business-to-business portals, lost $7.8 billion in value during March and April 2000.36 The merger between AOL and Time Warner fared so badly that the Time Warner CEO, having overseen a $99 billion loss, called it ‘the biggest mistake in corporate history’.37 There were, however, some long-term successes. The most notable of these was Amazon, which fell from $106 at the peak of the bubble to $6 by September 2001, but later recovered, eventually reaching over $2,000 per share in September 2018.

…

Financial Times, ‘US Stock Markets take wholesale battering as inflation worries rise’, 15 April 2000. 33. Norris, ‘Another technology victim’, New York Times, 29 April 2000. 34. Ofek and Richardson, ‘DotCom mania’, 1116. 35. Ofek and Richardson, ‘DotCom mania’, 1113. 36. Market capitalisation data obtained from Bloomberg. 37. Barnett and Andrews, ‘AOL merger was “the biggest mistake in corporate history”, believes Time Warner chief Jeff Bewkes’, Daily Telegraph, 28 September 2010. 38. Bloomberg. 39. Deutsche Börse Group, ‘Nemax 50’. 40. Source: Bloomberg. Notes: Each index includes only companies for which technology is the primary source of revenue, as categorised by the ICB Industry Classification Benchmark.

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back by Douglas Rushkoff

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, AOL-Time Warner, banks create money, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, big-box store, Bretton Woods, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Google Earth, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, market bubble, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, peak oil, peer-to-peer, place-making, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social software, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

Instead, they continue to depict the economy as a natural ecology, whose occasionally brutal results are no worse than those of cruel nature herself. That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, anyway. Journalists write this way only until the supposedly free and unfettered market comes after the periodical they happen to work for. When AOL bought Time Warner along with its portfolio of magazines, including Time, People, and Sports Illustrated, writers and editors at those publications complained that their periodicals were being turned into assets. Editorial budgets went down, writers were instructed to become more advertiser-friendly, and the integrity earned by the magazines through years of hard work was being spent all at once on lowbrow television specials and cross-promotions.

I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution by Craig Marks, Rob Tannenbaum

Adam Curtis, AOL-Time Warner, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, financial engineering, haute couture, Live Aid, Neil Armstrong, Parents Music Resource Center, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Tipper Gore, upwardly mobile

RANDY PHILLIPS is the CEO of the live entertainment company AEG Live. He has managed acts including Rod Stewart, Lionel Richie, and Guns N’ Roses. BOB PITTMAN is one of the founders of MTV. He led the network from its inception until his departure in 1987. Pittman was the first CEO of MTV Networks. He has served as president of America Online and as COO of AOL Time Warner. He is cofounder of the Pilot Group, a private investment firm, and is currently chairman of media and entertainment platforms for Clear Channel Communications. DALE PON is an advertising executive and one of the creators of the “I Want My MTV” ad campaign. KEVIN POWELL got into a wicked fight with Julie during season one of The Real World.

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

AT&T was barred from preventing competitors from making and selling handsets in 1968; Microsoft was prevented from locking consumers into Explorer, its on-ramp to the Internet, in 2001; and when local telephone carriers were deregulated in the 1980s and 1990s, they were required to make their networks interoperable so consumers could make calls from one network to another. Even the chat wars of the late 1990s ended with a similar intervention. When the FCC approved the merger of AOL and Time Warner in 2002, it forced AOL to make AIM interoperable with Yahoo!, MSN Messenger, and others. As a result, AOL’s market share in instant messaging fell from 65 percent before the merger, to 59 percent one year later, to just over 50 percent three years after that. In 2018, AIM ceded the entire chat market to new entrants like Apple, Facebook, Snapchat, and Google.

Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase by Duff McDonald

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Bear Stearns, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, business logic, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, housing crisis, interest rate swap, Jeff Bezos, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, profit motive, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, risk/return, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Saturday Night Live, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

And if that had been the case, why shouldn’t the title have come along with the job? Richard Bookstaber, author of A Demon of Our Own Design, considers the move one for the history books. “If somebody were to list the most costly single business decisions in the history of time, one would be the purchase of AOL by Time Warner,” he says. “That destroyed more value than anything else. Another thing was Sandy firing Jamie. I can’t envision that Citi would be in the problem it was in right now if Jamie had stayed there. That probably cost $200 to $300 billion. It’s pretty amazing.” • • • What lessons Jamie Dimon took from Sandy Weill is a question that has preoccupied a lot of market commentators since Dimon’s exit from Citigroup.

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value by Eduardo Porter

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, British Empire, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, flying shuttle, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, new economy, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, pension reform, Peter Singer: altruism, pets.com, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, ultimatum game, unpaid internship, urban planning, Veblen good, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

The NASDAQ index, heavy with technology stocks, quadrupled between 1996 and March of 2000. Drunk on information technology’s promise, people poured retirement savings into companies like Pets.com, which achieved fame, though never profit, on the strength of a cute ad with a sock puppet. In 2000, AOL could use its pricey stock to take over media goliath Time Warner, which had more than five times its revenue. By October of 2002 the NASDAQ was back where it had been in 1996. In 2010, Time Warner quietly spun off AOL for a tiny fraction of its price a decade before. The dot-com crash was preceded by the Asian financial crisis, with subsidiary bubblettes from Russia to Brazil, when a surge of money into promising “emerging markets” abruptly went into reverse.

…

The relationship between the price of orange juice and the weather is drawn from Richard Roll, “Orange Juice and Weather,” American Economic Review, Vol. 75, No. 5, 1984. Data on the rise and fall of home prices is from the Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller Home Prices Index (www.standardandpoors.com/indices/sp-case-shiller-home-price-indices/en/us/?indexId=spusa-cashpidff—p-us, accessed 07/19/2010). 229-233 When Prices Go Off the Rails: Data on AOL’s purchase of Time Warner draws from Saul Hansell, “America Online to Buy Time Warner for $165 Billion,” New York Times, January 11, 2000. The discussion of the seventeenth century’s financial bubbles and the United Kingdom’s Bubble Act draws from Kevin Lansing, “Asset Price Bubbles,” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Economic Letter, Number 2007-32, October 26, 2007; and Peter M.

Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner

AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, book scanning, Colossal Cave Adventure, Columbine, corporate governance, Free Software Foundation, game design, glass ceiling, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Marc Andreessen, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Neal Stephenson, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, slashdot, Snow Crash, software patent, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, X Prize

The DWANGO idea wasn’t breakthrough–id had thought of it themselves but just hadn’t gotten around to programming it; since Quake was going to be playable over the Internet, they had figured they would hold off on creating the multiplayer online feature. Anyway, Jay concurred, he certainly didn’t want some bozos doing the job, not when they had companies like AOL and Time Warner calling. “Well,” Romero said, “maybe I’ll take five minutes and see what this disk does.” Back home in Texas, Romero popped the disk in his hard drive and dialed up the Houston number. After his modem whooshed, he saw a message on screen from Kee: “Come on, let’s try a game.” Next thing he knew, there they were–Kee in Houston, Romero in Dallas–playing a spontaneous pickup game of Doom II deathmatch.