[pbiggar]

The merger was sheer brialliance on the part of AOL. Aware of how completely overvalued they were, they "merged" (aka bought) Time Warner for pennies on the dollar of real value. Then when the dot-com bubble burst, they didn't get completely hosed as their share price dropped to nothing, which is what happened to everyone else.

(note: I'm not sure of my history here, so please feel free to correct me if you know better)

[adestefan]

At the time AOL really thought they were going to be the savior of traditional media. The sky was the limit and they were no where near the top. The next place everyone would go to get their news, entertainment, and world information would be "web portals." The idea was to cram as much stuff as possible on your homepage were people could see everything and amazed at the sheer amount of information. AOL did it, Netscape did it, Yahoo did it , etc.