CLEC), and with it UUNET, the leading ISP, WorldCom had put together the most inte- grated telecommunications company since the breakup of the Bell System. It owned a long distance backbone, an ISP, local dial tone, and fiber-optic local loops of its own. How did WorldCom get SO big SO fast? The company had only been founded in 1983, by a group of businessmen largely funded by Bernard Ebbers, a Canadian who had become a basketball coach and then motel owner in Missis- sippi. Hardly the type of background one expects from a technology titan, Ebbers' company was originally called Long Distance Discount Service. Over the next decade it had a ravenous appetite for acquisitions. It rolled up dozens of small long distance companies, including Advanced Telecom Corp. (ATC), American Network, Claydesta Digital, Microtel, Mid-American, and NTS, among others [19]. It acquired the long distance operations no longer wanted by corporate giants Metromedia and ITT. By the end of 1994, it had a 1.3% share of the long distance business [20]. Ebbers' style of acquisition was aggressive. He was not afraid of a "Pac-Man" acquisition, in which his company swallowed up a larger one whole, remaining the controlling party. That required a high stock The Internet Boom and the Limits to Growth price. He could then buy companies for stock, rather than cash. His stock in trade was his stock, in trade. The high stock price was not based SO much on earnings as on a high price-earnings multiple, based on investors' expectation of rapid future growth. Companies with a high multiple live in a world of eat or get eaten. This was a good example of the management style described by Rolf Wild in his 1978 book Management by Compulsion: The Corporate Urge to Grow [21]. Profit and stability are, in a world of hostile acquisitions, secondary to a rapid growth rate, which is what produces a high multiple. A company that has a high multiple can stage friendly or, if necessary, hostile takeovers of competi- tors with lower multiples. Ebbers did not want to 