tors was Berkshire Hathaway Corp., Warren Buffet's investment vehicle, which was famously skeptical about boom investing. Level 3 was also able to take advantage of the bargains that post-meltdown companies left behind and thus improve its bottom line. But along the way, some mighty strange deals occurred. It acquired two major software distributors, Software Spectrum and Corporate Software, whose business had little in common with the rest of Level 3's operations but whose cash flow was high-a combined annual revenue of more than $2 billion. It has been suggested that the deal was done to meet financing covenants that had promised unrealistic revenue growth. If Level 3 could not grow its revenues organically, it could do SO by buying profitable busi- nesses-in other industries. The company's status in the ISP world was elevated when, in 2002, it acquired the assets of bankrupt backbone ISP Genuity. That company was cre- ated when Bell Atlantic acquired GTE Corp. in 2000 and had to spin off its backbone assets because the company did not yet have its authority, under The Great Telecom Meltdown Section 271 of the Telecom Act, to offer interLATA service. Genuity's IPO, which raised $1.9 billion, occurred at the trailing edge of the boom. The com- pany had a unique management structure that gave "supermajority" power to Verizon even though the latter's nominal ownership interest of 9.5% was below the 10% cap in Section 271. It also permitted Genuity's losses to be kept off of Verizon's books, in contrast to how, as GTE Internetworking, its losses had harmed parent GTE Corp.'s bottom line. Verizon retained an "option" to reac- quire Genuity within five years of the IPO, provided that it acquired Section 271 authority in most states. That option would have, if exercised, created enough shares to give Verizon a majority interest. Thus Genuity's true market capitalization could be factored in two ways, with or without the options counted in the share total; the IPO value could have been much less than the actual value h