Munk, Nina. Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. 352 pages.

Nina Munk, a writer for Fortune and Vanity Fair, not only spent hundreds of hours in interviews for this book, but she also put it together so that it's a pleasure to read. The research behind the book is impressive, while only a novelist could spin a better yarn. You can hardly wait to move from the chapter titled "Enter the Internet Cowboys" and through "The Big Deal" (when AOL bought Time Warner) and then to the endgame as it all began to fall apart one year later. By late 2003, their stock was down 70 percent from January 2001 when the deal closed. It is still at that low level as of early 2006.

This is a book about two very different companies that merged during the Internet bubble. AOL puffed up with the bubble, and in 1999 its market cap was twice Time Warner's, even though it had only one-fifth of that old-media company's revenues. That's when Steve Case talked Jerry Levin, who was feeling rather obsolete, into a merger. The AOL gunslingers waltzed into Time Warner and alienated everyone, and at the same time the bubble popped. By the end of the book the AOL people had been purged, lawyers hired by stockholders were salivating, and Time Warner was in turmoil. A sad ending: Most of the insiders cashed out in the first half of 2001, while the stock was still doing okay, and retired comfortably.
ISBN 0-06-054034-6

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