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A comment on Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return. Parent comment

Re:Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return by HWR_14 on Thursday October 07, 2021 @04:31PM (#28791668)
> The dumb mergers and other mistakes were window dressing on this landscape transformation.

Were all AOL's mergers dumb? IIRC, they used their sky-high stock price to buy Time Warner (among other things), and once AOL was no longer the cash cow they turned out to own a lot of valuable things.

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Re:Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return by ethbr0 on Thursday October 07, 2021 @06:08PM (#28792727)
As with all mergers, it depends on to whom / for what.

For AOL shareholders, by 2002, between the merger and the dotcom bubble bursting, 2002$200 B (so about 2021$5.5 T?) had been wiped from AOL's market cap.

So that was, presumably, not good.

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Re:Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return by HWR_14 on Friday October 08, 2021 @10:36AM (#28799772)
What a weird way of looking at it. First, how did you turn 2002's $200B into 2021's $5.5T?

But my point was if it wasn't for the merger, the AOL stockholders would have lost far more in the dotcom bubble bursting. Pointing out they lost a lot in the combined events isn't really a counterargument.

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