During the tech bubble it was all the rage evey month for AOL to shout to the world how many retail subscribers they now had, and if memory serves, it was around 30 million or so.

Today of course AOL and Time Warner have married, and it's a new investment world.

Yet I keep reading and hearing that a lot of the "wizards" of Wall Street are thinking that because AOL internet looses so much money, it will be spun off.

Admittedly, I have not looked to see if the internet portion of the business is really losing money, and I assume that AOL has more retail subscribers today than it did during the tech bubble.

But just for fun, let's say that AOL internet has 20 million retail subscribers. Each of these subscribers pays on average $20 a month. The actual numbers may be more or less than these, but I have a hunch these are reasonably close.

So AOL internet is taking in $400,000,000 a month, or $4,800,000,000 a year, just from its internet operations.

And they can't make any money? Hmmmmm, perhaps the SEC really is on to something.

Wax