AOL

AOL began in 1985 as Quantum Computer Services, a Vienna, Virginia startup co-founded by Jim Kimsey, Steve Case, and Marc Seriff that launched Quantum Link, an online service for Commodore 64/128 owners. The company renamed itself America Online in 1991 and went public on Nasdaq on March 19, 1992. Aggressive CD-mailer marketing and the simple dial-up client with the catchphrase 'You've Got Mail' made AOL the dominant U.S. consumer on-ramp to the internet through the 1990s, peaking at roughly 26.7 million subscribers in 2002. Flush with inflated dot-com-era stock, AOL acquired Israeli instant-messaging pioneer Mirabilis (ICQ) in 1998 for about $287 million, Netscape Communications later that year for about $4.2 billion, and MapQuest in 1999 for about $1.1 billion. In January 2000, at the height of the bubble, AOL announced a stock-for-stock merger with Time Warner valued at roughly $165 billion (reported as high as $182 billion including debt) -- the largest corporate merger in history at the time; it closed in January 2001 to form AOL Time Warner. The deal is now widely cited as one of the worst mergers in corporate history: the dot-com crash, a culture clash between the internet upstart and the legacy media conglomerate, and AOL's collapsing dial-up revenue drove a record $99 billion annual loss in 2002, and the combined company eventually dropped the AOL name. Time Warner spun AOL back out as an independent, separately traded public company on December 9-10, 2009, under CEO Tim Armstrong, who repositioned it as a content and advertising business, acquiring TechCrunch (2010), The Huffington Post ($315 million, 2011), and video ad platform Adap.tv (about $405 million, 2013). Verizon Communications bought AOL in 2015 for about $4.4 billion, then folded it together with its 2017 Yahoo acquisition into a media subsidiary rebranded 'Oath' (later Verizon Media). In 2021, Verizon sold Verizon Media to funds managed by Apollo Global Management for about $5 billion, and the resulting private-equity-owned company took the Yahoo name, with AOL continuing on as one of its brands. Bending Spoons, the Italian app-development roll-up company, agreed in October 2025 to acquire AOL from Yahoo for roughly $1.45-1.5 billion, alongside its other acquisitions of Vimeo, Evernote, and Meetup. AOL formally discontinued its legacy dial-up internet access service on September 30, 2025, closing out a defining chapter of the early consumer internet. In 2026, AOL operates as a web portal and media brand under Bending Spoons -- AOL Mail, news and content aggregation, and paid consumer add-ons like identity-protection plans and AOL Desktop Gold -- with a workforce sharply reduced through post-acquisition restructuring (including a ~108-person layoff at its Reston, VA office in February 2026).