Former Time Warner executive Gerald Levin dead at 84

Gerald Levin, a media executive who was one of the architects of the failed Time Warner-AOL merger in the early 2000s, died this week.

Levin, 84, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and lived in California. new york times report.

Mr. Levin, one of the most powerful executives in an era when cable TV ratings were at an all-time high, and then-AOL president Steve Case built what was then the largest corporate acquisition in American history.

After AOL Time Warner’s creation, the company’s stock price fell more than 30 percent, and it posted a loss of nearly $100 billion in 2002, a record for any company at the time, the Times reported.

The company’s failure is widely seen as one of the biggest casualties of the bursting of the dot-com bubble at the beginning of this century.

“I think Jerry is justified in criticizing him, but some of the facts about AOL’s complaint were — and I’m careful to say — grossly exaggerated, which means Jerry was largely wrong on the merits. “No,” Faye Vincent, a former commissioner of Major League Baseball and a director of both companies, told the newspaper. “Looks like we got on the wrong horse.”