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AOL and Time Warner announced plans to merge, a deal approved by the FTC on January 11, 2001. The deal came to exemplify the bursting of the Internet bubble, and was later considered one of the worst corporate mergers in history. The deal destroyed more than $200 billion in shareholder value, as AOL's stock plummeted from a total value of about $226 billion to about $20 billion.AOL is a company in transition, made evident by discussions of buy-outs and joint ventures during a period of dramatic decline in AOL's subscriber base. News reports in fall 2005 identified companies such as Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google as candidates for turning AOL into a joint venture; those plans were apparently abandoned when it was revealed on December 20, 2005 that Google would purchase a 5% share of AOL for $1 billion.
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