What was WorldCom?
Through the 1990s and into the telecoms boom at the start of the 21st century, WorldCom (formerly LDDS WorldCom), with CEO Bernard Ebbers at the helm, became one of America’s largest long-distance telecommunications companies. WorldCom’s growth was achieved through acquisitions, with the list of takeovers, re-organisations, mergers etc being mind-boggling on its own, without even looking at any financial details. Deals included the takeover of Advanced Communications in 1992 and MFS Communications in 1996 (which netted UUNet Technologies, only just acquired by NFS). In 1998, WorldCom bought up CompuServe, kept CompuServe’s network division, and sold its pioneering online services to America Online in exchange for AOL’s network division. The peak of WorldCom’s acquisition spree also came in 1998 when it bought MCI, and for a brief period traded as MCI WorldCom. But even this event would have been eclipsed had WorldCom succeeded in its most audacious plan to date, the attempted $129b mer
