AOL’s Tim Armstrong: ‘If there’s one law, it’s that nobody owns the future’

Chief executive on creating value, the impact of adblocking, and why HuffPo isn't chasing profits

When he joined AOL as chief executive in 2009, Tim Armstrong had to unravel "the biggest mistake in corporate history", spinning the company off at a value of $2.5bn, not much more than a 100th of what it was worth when it merged with Time Warner at the height of the dotcom bubble. Last year, he oversaw its sale to mobile network Verizon for $4.4bn.

"It's a climb up," Armstrong told the Guardian during a trip to the UK before Christmas. "AOL was a company that went from a $150bn valuation down to a billion dollars overall. At the same time that was happening, when I was at Google, we went from sub-$1bn valuation up to $150bn."

Continue reading...