Billionaire investor Steve Case says the failure of the 2000 AOL Time Warner mega merger taught him a crucial lesson about execution

Hollis Johnson/Business Insider

• Steve Case is the billionaire founding CEO of AOL and the head of Washington, DC-based venture-capital firm Revolution.
• In 2000, AOL bought Time Warner for $ 165 billion, making it the largest merger in history at the time.
• Case left in 2005, correctly predicting it was an unsustainable partnership.
• He said that the experience taught him that “vision without execution is hallucination.”

AOL’s founding CEO Steve Case embraced Time Warner head Jerry Levin and raised his fist in triumph at the press conference marking the $ 165 merger of their two companies in January, 2000. It was the largest merger deal in history, resulting in the world’s largest media conglomerate.

Two months later, the dot-com bubble burst, and AOL Time Warner’s valuation came crashing down, setting the context for years of clashes between the two companies’ cultures and ambitions. Case left the board in 2005, writing an editorial in the Washington Post shortly after his departure declaring the merger — which ultimately fell apart in 2009 — a failure.

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