Time Warner now has been involved in two huge deals that show the pitfalls of trying to fuse media and new distribution businesses. Its $106 billion merger in 2001 with AOL Inc. was one of the biggest flops in business history. Time Warner eventually spun off AOL. AT&T’s pursuit of Hollywood business set it apart from rival Verizon Communications, which focused mostly on its core wireless business. Still, Verizon spent nearly $10 billion exploring digital media, acquiring AOL in 2015 and Yahoo in 2017. It later wrote down about half of those properties’ values after they failed to deliver the growth the company promised.
