Kerplunk

You knew right from the start it couldn't work, the 2000 merger of AOL and Time Warner. Not when Steve Case,  the C.E.O. for AOL, the dot com company, shows up at the announcement wearing a tie, and Gerald Levin, the Time Warner C.E.O. of the historic entertainment and media behemoth, shows up without wearing a tie. Can't tell from the photo if Gerald's also wearing jeans, which would have only been worse.

As soon as the word "synergy' escaped someone's lips, the entire deal was destined to be a Harvard Business School case study, And not because of its success.

As bad as the deal became, it especially put a catastrophic crimp in Ted Turner's net worth. The obit writer for the NYT, Chris Kornelis, tells us:

By the start of 2002, AOL Time Warner's market value was hovering around  $127 billion. The year, the company posted a net loss of $98.7 billion, a record for a U.S. company. Ted Turner, the company's largest individual shareholder at the time of merger, later told The New York Times that the deal had cost him 80 percent of his worth, about $8 billion. Mr. Levin resigned in 2002.

Ted Turner did have a good start to the new millennium. His 10 marriage to Jane Fonda imploded in 2001, resulting in a settlement to Jane in the millions. I guess she didn't take him for better or worse. Who knew mismatched dressed C.E.O.s might have scuttled Ted's marriage.

In 1997 Ted famously donated $1 billion to the U.N. Good thing it preceded the AOL Time Warner merger by a few years.

The obit tells us that Gerald Levin was seen as a media genius by having HBO be the first cable outlet to use satellites to provide national access to the cable company's offerings. Mr. Levin was quoted  as saying in James Andrew Miller's book "Tinderbox: HBO's Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers" (2021):

"The only way you get ahead is if you see something that no one else sees and it's a little bit crazy." [See "Elon Musk" by Walter Isaacson]

As the expected "synergy" (there's word you won't hear too often these days.) did not materialize, the analysts pointed out how mismatched the C.E.O.s were.

It was said by Mr. Miller, the author of "Tinderbox," that Levin "was the last person that central casting would've sent over" to run the world's largest media company. Levin "was an intellectual who liked to quote the Bible and the French philosopher Albert Camus."

AOL Time Warner dropped "AOL" from its name in 2003 and in 2009 Time Warner spun off the AOL unit to shareholders with a market capitalization of $3.5 billion.

Poor Gerald. He should've worn a tie that day.

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