• Silicon Alley Insider, Wednesday, July 2, 2008 12:30 PM

At a senior staff meeting yesterday, Time Warner chief Jeff Bewkes suggested that AOL might be for sale, a source told Silicon Alley Insider. Meanwhile, another source stopped short of saying the company was for sale, instead claiming that "everyone is talking to everyone", and that AOL might someday be sold. Time Warner corroborated the latter source, saying that Bewkes' remarks were made in the context of a lengthy meeting about the state of the industry and AOL.

In other words, not much has changed among the Web's giants in the months following Microsoft's bid for Yahoo. Everyone is talking--Microsoft, News Corp., Time Warner, Yahoo, Google--which means there are lots of potential scenarios, including a rapid AOL sale to either Yahoo or Microsoft.

As Henry Blodget says: "The key question for Time Warner shareholders is whether Time Warner can get a bidding war going" between Microsoft and Yahoo. This is a battle Microsoft could easily win if it wanted to, but the software giant would first have to completely put its Yahoo negotiations in the past. In the end, Blodget believes a bidding war could end up landing Time Warner up to $15 billion in cash for AOL. Without a bidding war, he says the once-mighty company would be worth $10 billion or less.

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