It's a remarkable run for Bending Spoons, which was founded by four students, including three Italians, in Denmark thirteen years ago, which was then on the brink of bankruptcy after a failed first entrepreneurial venture.

Bending Spoons, a curious name inspired by the film Matrix, a nod to the protagonists' ability to bend reality through sheer force of will, has since made a specialty of buying declining internet assets and restoring their value.

After a flurry of entirely minor deals, the 2023 purchase of Evernote triggered a series of far more serious acquisitions, paid for by debt. In 2025, Bending Spoons carried out a major refinancing of $4.6bn.

Fans of the genre will note that the group has increased its revenue tenfold in just four years, and that it now reports operating profit before amortization, or EBITDA, of $800m.

Others denounce a house of cards, net debt, meanwhile, has been multiplied by 36 times in four years, with questionable operating methods, as well as dubious financial transparency, including a carefully maintained haze around the performance of each segment.

Students of financial history will see in this return to the stock market, by proxy, of AOL a striking parallel with the implosion of the "dot-com" bubble at the start of the century: its climax, in fact, was the ill-fated AOL-Time Warner merger.

One notable difference, all the same, between Bending Spoons and other comparable players of the same kind that typically bloom at the top of major financial manias: for now, and if its accounts are not lying, the group founded in 2013 is spectacularly profitable.