The mergers that weren’t to be

In last week’s Brandstand, we asked you to name some merger deals that came unstuck. Here are some: Daimler Benz acquired Chrysler in 1998 for $36 billion, but found the going tough due to differences in culture, and paid Cerberus Capital Management $650 million in 2007 to get rid of it. The $164-billion AOL-Time Warner merger of 2000 is another case of a marriage going sour. Other failures include the Sprint-Nextel merger, those of eBay and Skype, Kmart and Sears, Newscorp and MySpace, and Alcatel and Lucent.