Wall Street Folly

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Act of desperation? Yahoo! is said to be considering AOL merger talks

Sure sounds like an act of desperation to us....

Yahoo! is seeking to restart merger talks with AOL as a means of defending itself against the $45 billion (£23 billion) hostile bid approach from Microsoft, The Times has learnt.

It is understood that Yahoo! and its team of advisers from Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers, the US investment banks, have spent the past week evaluating possible tie-ups with media and technology firms that would save it from being swallowed by Microsoft.

Yahoo! set to revive merger talks with AOL after rejecting hostile takeover - The Times of London

Microsoft set to approach Yahoo shareholders - Financial Times

Deja view: Time warner may shed some cable, double down on the net (can you spell 'A-O-L'?)

According to the WSJ, Time Warner is considering lightening up on its cable assets and possibly making a big internet purchase.  Like they had so much success with AOL:

Inside Time Warner Inc., senior executives are considering what was once unthinkable: whether the world's biggest media company should substantially reduce its cable-TV holdings over time.

Cable has been a core part of the company and its precursors for decades and is now the biggest contributor to profits. But the long-term future of cable, as the Internet emerges as a viable venue for watching TV, is murky. Some within Time Warner wonder whether the company wouldn't be better off if it were to get out of cable and double down on the Web -- where it already owns AOL -- by buying another major Internet company, just as News Corp. acquired MySpace and Google Inc. bought YouTube.

To be sure, a complete exit is the least likely course to be adopted, people involved in the debate say. More likely is that Time Warner will decide to gradually reduce its 84% stake in Time Warner Cable Inc., possibly through acquisitions, while still maintaining a significant interest.

The big dig: AOL gonna search for gold

As if we needed more reasons to ridicule AOL:   The company is getting ready to literally dig for gold on properties belonging to the parents and grandparents of a big email spammer that it won $12.8 million judgement from last year.  So far AOL hasn't been able to contact Davis Wolfgang Hawke so they haven't been able to collect any of their judgement.

America Online is prepared to take a backhoe to a Medfield couple’s yard in a search for as much as $500,000 in hidden gold and platinum bars it believes may have been buried there by their neo-Nazi son who made millions off of Internet spam scams.

AOL, the giant Internet provider, said it’s only trying to collect ill-gotten assets from Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a former Westwood High School graduate-turned-neo-Nazi cyber con artist.

AOL co-founder Steve Case on Charlie Rose

Charlie Rose hosted AOL's co-founder Steve Case on his show last Friday.  Case talked about his new venture, Revolution LLC, and Rose also put him on the hot seat about the Time Warner merger.  Case said that at the time "the idea of the merger...made tremendous sense".  Asked if he was sorry that he did the merger, he said "Yes, I'm sorry."...

Charlie Rose - Christiane Amanpour / Steve Case / Paul Giamatti

The Case interview begins around 15 1/2 minutes into the show;  his AOL comments start at the 30 minute point of the tape.