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Four Greatest Ways (So Far) to Become
M M Ia ulti- illionaire on the nternet

Introduction

The Internet itself must qualify as one of the greatest business ideas of all time. But it
was, of course, to begin with an academic idea with the linking up of universities to
allow each other to benefit from work they were all doing, so I have chosen its applica-
tions rather than the net itself. We have already looked at e-mail Idea 60, and in this
section we look at people who have made vast sums of money by convincing people
that they could hugely exploit the virtues of the net. Notice how they have not made
vast sums by exploiting the net, but by persuading people that they were about to.

The Internet bubble of the late 1990s is a phenomenon widely written about,
since it has had an impact on everyone’s savings, pensions and economic success –
and all of it adverse.

Perhaps the epitome of this phenomenon is Steve Case, the man who invented
AOL and eventually sold it to Time Warner in 1999 with such good timing as to make
one suspect he is a prophet as well as an innovator. The combination of technological
expertise – AOL – with hugely successful content – Time Warner – looked to most
people a real winner. Steve Case got incredibly rich; but it was just before the bubble
burst. By early 2002 the shareholders, by now sitting on a share that had dropped
76% since the company was formed, got fed up. Wanting some short-term success as
well as promises for the future, they outmanoeuvred Case and he left the company.

His, and some other peoples’, vision still lives and the Internet is becoming
more and more part of corporate and private life. To be fair, it was not their fault
that a feeding frenzy started and professional investment managers decided they
could not risk not joining the bandwagon and taxi drivers started giving share tips.
This last is a sure sign of troubles ahead and, sure enough, all the companies in-
volved have been revalued and many have gone out of business.