Was just over reading at Jill’s place and several threads were all clustered together on the “What’s New Since Last Visit” listing. The first was the news that it seems that there’s a clause in AOL’s 2002 contract with Google that entitles them to first rights on about 1.9 million shares of Google should they decide to go public. True, there’s not a lot there that is very interesting, deals like this happen all the time.
But, when you get to the second thread it starts to get a little creepy. You see, there’s some speculation going around that Time Warner is-maybe-might-be trying to sell AOL to Microsoft. And so the curse is upon us, we do live in interesting times, indeed.
Thanks for the origin of that quote. I didn’t quite believe that it was a “chinese” curse, or even an “arabic” curse, which was the rumor I heard.
I also tend to view NY Post speculations with a grain of salt (though I do like their sports coverage.)
It’s difficult to tell what impact that warrant will have. We know that if there is an IPO that the present owners of Google will likely keep fairly large percentages of the business. If 1.9 million shares is valued at $22 million dollars, and the projection IPO might raise many times more than that, then 1.9 million shares might not be a very large piece of the whole thing at all.
We’d probably have to look at the actual agreement to get a better sense of what’s going on.
Comment by Bill — March 20, 2004 @ 8:28 pm