[wardaddy]

Time Warner shareholders will receive 1.5 shares of AOL Time Warner for each share of Time Warner stock they own while AOL shareholders will receive one share of AOL Time Warner stock for each share of AOL they own.

This was an all stock deal with AOL getting 55% of the new stock. It would seem to me that Case, Parsons, and Pittman of the AOL side have all seen the AOL/TW shares they converted to slide the same as Levin and Ted and Malone. What number of those said shares and options they exercised at a higher value is not known to me. I do believe I read that Pittman had exercised some of his options much earlier long before he was canned. The main winners in this horribly overvalued deal were the M&A folks and the saavy folks who timed the bump and slide correctly. At this juncture I fail to see how this merger has helped Steve Case. His stock has fallen from nearly 100 or so to now less than 10.

[habs4ever]

As I wrote earlier, what Case was doing was for the benefit of AOL shareholders.What he did with his own PERSONEL stake I have no idea, but dumping high priced, outdated technology by using a higher P/E for better, lower cost technology is a prudent use of shareholder equity.How the market chose to punish AOL stock does not detract from the merits of Case doing this deal.