Italian technology company Bending Spoons is reported to be in talks to acquire AOL from Yahoo for about $1.4 billion. Bending Spoons recently acquired the online video platform Vimeo for a similar sum, having previously picked up Brightcove. AOL was once on an online giant and its combination with Time Warner was the biggest merger in history at the time, the height of the dot com boom.
AOL, originally known as America Online, acquired the Netscape browser company in 1998 for $4.2 billion. In 2001, it purchased Time Warner in the largest merger ever at the time, with the combined companies valued at $360 billion. It came to be seen as one of the worst corporate mergers in history and a business school cautionary tale.
By 2015, AOL was acquired by Verizon for $4.4 billion, which merged it with Yahoo! to create something called Oath, later renamed Verizon Media, of which 90% was sold to Apollo Global Management for $5 billion in 2021.
Any acquisition by the Milan-based software company, which has yet to be confirmed, would mark the latest in one of the strangest stories of the internet era.
Bending Spoons recently acquired the online video platform Vimeo for $1.38 billion, its largest acquisition to date. The company has a reputation for shedding staff from acquired businesses and aiming to improve efficiency. A strategy for integrating its various video assets has yet to emerge.
Bending Spoons promotes itself with the strapline “Impossible. Maybe.” It ironically invites comparison with previous examples of manipulation and misdirection that proved to be illusory.