The AOL Time Warner Disaster | TTYL, AOL | 4

Business Wars

Wondery

History, Business, David Brown, Management

4.6 • 13.2K Ratings

🗓️ 7 August 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Can you remember the last time you got mail from an AOL email address? Or fired off an IM? In the 1990s, AOL was the hottest name in cyberspace, but now it’s a digital ghost. Journalist and author Nina Munk is the author of Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner — she explains how the merger meltdown led to AOL’s demise. Plus, Lauren Goode and Michael Calore of the Wired podcast Uncanny Valley share a remembrance of AOL Instant Messenger — and how it laid the groundwork for online communication as we know it.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wonderly Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of Business Wars, the AOL Time Warner disaster, early and ad-free right now.
0:08.3	Join Wonderly Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
0:17.0	I'm David Brown, and this is Business Wars. Today, America Online is but a shadow of what it once was, now existing as a subsidiary of Yahoo
0:51.2	owned by a private equity company. But in the 1990s, AOL was everywhere.
0:58.0	My breath catches in my chest until I hear three little words.
1:02.1	You got mail. I was just asking if you ever got my email. Shugow. What? That's my screen
1:08.5	name, Shugal. If you need to reach me, my email is Chunky L53 at AOL.
1:14.0	AOL had cameos in the 1998 rom-com.
1:17.0	You've Got Mail, Sex in the City, and the Simpsons, to name a few.
1:20.5	And that's because AOL was the moment, getting hundreds of millions of users connected across the world.
1:27.1	Whether you were emailing your family across the country
1:30.1	or sending an instant message to your friend across the hall,
1:33.8	AOL was your gateway to staying in touch digitally.
1:37.4	But when the dot-com bubble burst,
1:39.6	and their merger with legacy media company Time Warner
1:42.7	fell apart in the early aOL hit hard times.
1:47.1	The cultural clash was tough to look past. The AOL crew led by founder Steve Case was young,
1:53.3	unconventional, and a bit like a fraternity. The Time Warner group led by CEO Jerry Levin was
1:59.8	more old school, serious, refined,
2:02.9	and the two just couldn't see eye-to-eye.
2:05.7	To say the merger crashed out would be an understatement.
2:09.9	Nina Monk is the author of Fools Rush In, Steve Case, Jerry Levine,
	...

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