October 29, 2025
You’ve got buyers!
AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for roughly $1.5B
Internet's 90s giant gets an Italian glow-up - cue 'AOL still exists?' freakout
TLDR: AOL is being sold to Italy’s Bending Spoons for $1.5B, with 30 million users and big cash still flowing. The crowd is split between “AOL still exists?” jokes, nostalgia for its $200B glory days, and debate over whether Bending Spoons’ debt-fueled makeover can actually revive the brand.
AOL is being sold to Italian tech owner Bending Spoons for about $1.5 billion, and the internet immediately went full spit-take. The loudest reaction: “Wait… AOL still exists?” Commenters piled on with nostalgia and snark, riffing on dial-up screeches and “You’ve got mail” while asking what the company even does now. The answer: mostly email and web content for 30 million monthly users (that’s a lot of inboxes), plus hundreds of millions in free cash flow—aka serious cash profits. Suddenly, the jokes turned into “OK, that’s a money printer.”
The thread turned into a link-fest. One user waved the Bending Spoons wiki and an old HN thread, another dropped an archive, and a history buff flexed the wild stat that AOL once hit a $200 billion market cap, with a wistful CNBC look-back. A curious commenter asked, “what does AOL even do these days?” while others pointed to a Bending Spoons deep dive via Pragmatic Engineer. Drama flared over Bending Spoons’ playbook: long-term turnarounds (they’re also buying Vimeo) versus eyebrow-raises at the $4 billion in new debt financing. Fans say AOL will finally get a stable home; skeptics wonder if an Italian makeover can make America’s most iconic inbox cool again. Meanwhile, the memes write themselves: you’ve got buyers, and maybe—just maybe—a glow-up
Key Points
- •Apollo Global Management will sell AOL to Bending Spoons for about $1.5 billion.
- •AOL generates hundreds of millions of dollars in free cash flow and has ~30 million monthly active users.
- •The deal is expected to close by the end of this year or early next year.
- •Bending Spoons raised $2.8 billion in debt to fund the AOL acquisition and future investments, part of ~$4 billion secured this year.
- •Bending Spoons’ strategy is to acquire large user-base assets, invest in technology-driven turnarounds, and hold long term; it also agreed to acquire Vimeo for $1.38 billion in September.