Stealing Time : Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner
Author: Alec Klein
List Price: $25.95
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0743247868
Publisher: Simon & Schuster (June, 2003)
Sales Rank: 26,858
Average Customer Rating: 4 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 4 out of 5
Excellent look behind the scenes at the AOL disaster
This is a terrific new book by a Washington Post reporter who followed AOL for the newspaper through its ups, its way ups, its downs and its way downs (now). The most appealing part of the book is that the subject is approached without malice. Klein could have taken a muckraking, expose the crooks attitude, but he did not. Perhaps this is because he spent so much time with "the boys at AOL" during the time he covered them for the Post.
The book appears to be very thoroughly documented and balanced. In the end, however, we are left with one, strong conclusion: AOL cooked the books to get the merger done with Time Warner and continued to cook them as long as possible to keep the numbers up after the merger. They did so, as has been documented previously, by booking phony ad sales when money flowed both ways and counting as revenue money that had not yet arrived.
This book is lively, a quick read and not harshly judgmental toward AOL, even while presenting strong indications that negative judgments would be justified. As at other high flying enterprises in the 1990s, AOL people often used company money like it was Iraqi dinars looted from the central bank. The "expensed" lavish trips and parties and rode their stock options to the stars. Almost every reference to Steve Case finds him in a different city, often other continents. Why work when you can travel in high style?
There is no doubt that a kind of stock and money madness enveloped AOL. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect, for some, will be the revelations about how much money was wasted both by AOL and its stock optioned employees on their own. While the record is shocking, I have a feeling that Klien barely scratched the surface in this regard.
It is clear, from this book and other reporting, that AOL should never have taken over Time Warner, any more than a mouse should try to eat an elephant. AOL was flying high on the combination of its subscriber revenues, temporarily inflated ad revenues and, more importantly, the expectations of investors that the Internet had no known limits (it did). Most of this had to be known Steve Case and his high spending, high flying group at AOL. They went ahead with the merger anyway, at all costs. Turns out, they lost their jobs and, for many of them, their fortunes. This was not a good merger that went bad, this was a merger that should never have even been considered, much less finished.
This book should be interesting to anyone who follows American business, who invested in tech stocks during the gold rush and anyone else who simply wants to learn about human nature and money. Highly recommended.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Excellent tour through the AOL Time Warner disaster
This is a terrific new book by a Washington Post reporter who followed AOL for the newspaper through its ups, its way ups, its downs and its way downs (now). The most appealing part of the book is that the subject is approached without malice. Klein could have taken a muckraking, expose the crooks attitude, but he did not. Perhaps this is because he spent so much time with "the boys at AOL" during the time he covered them for the Post.
The book appears to be very thoroughly documented and balanced. In the end, however, we are left with one, strong conclusion: AOL cooked the books to get the merger done with Time Warner and continued to cook them as long as possible to keep the numbers up after the merger. They did so, as has been documented previously, by booking phony ad sales when money flowed both ways and counting as revenue money that had not yet arrived.
It is clear, from this book and other reporting, that AOL should never have taken over Time Warner, any more than a mouse should try to eat an elephant. AOL was flying high on the combination of its subscriber revenues, temporarily inflated ad revenues and, more importantly, the expectations of investors that the Internet had no known limits (it did). Most of this had to be known Steve Case and his high spending, high flying group at AOL. They went ahead with the merger anyway, at all costs. Turns out, they lost their jobs and, for many of them, their fortunes.
There is no doubt that a kind of stock and money madness enveloped AOL. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect, for some, will be the revelations about how much money was wasted both by AOL and its stock optioned employees on their own. While the record is shocking, I have a feeling that Klien barely scratched the surface in this regard.
This book should be interesting to anyone who follows American business, who invested in tech stocks during the gold rush and anyone else who simply wants to learn about human nature and money. Highly recommended.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Hugely informative and unfailingly entertaining
In a very efficient 300 pages, Klein superlatively tells us so much more than just the utterly fantastic account of how one of the world's greatest media brands was indeed stolen by the upstarts from AOL. I found much insight here into the history of the dotcom bubble and death spiral; the desperate search for response by old media companies to the advent of the web; the corporate culture issues that helped doom the merger; the sordid details of the wantonly deceitful games AOL's people played with their numbers during the fateful 12 months between contract signing and closing with TW; brilliant compact sketches of all the key figures; and more. Since AOL's rise and fall was so inextricably linked to the chimera of vc-infused dotcom ad budgets, Klein's book provides an important lesson in understanding the absurd fragility of the whole struture of the bubble economy. Similar Products
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