 to fix AtHome's service problems. And they showed little inclination to open their cable systems to other Internet service providers. So Som- ers, who was now firmly in charge of AT&T Broadband, was given the assignment of convincing AtHome's cable partners to sing from the same sheet of music. By the end of March 2000, he had convinced Comcast and Cox to give up their veto rights in exchange for a "put" on their shares. In essence, AT&T agreed to buy Cox and Comcast's interests in AtHome for at least $48 a share, up to an aggregate value of $3.2 billion, at any time between January I, 2001, and June 4, 2002. Since AtHome's stock was then trading at about $33 a share and anything connected with the Internet commanded outrageous stock multiples, it didn't seem like a bad bet. Cox and Comcast also won the right to end their exclusivity agree- ments early and to terminate them entirely by June 200I. But since warrants to acquire new shares were tied to increasing their distribu- tion of the AtHome high-speed Internet service, that didn't seem like a bad bet, either. Trouble AtHome Precisely what happened to AtHome in the following months has been the subject of numerous court suits, but some events are uncon- testable. AtHome's losses went from about $140 million at the end of 1998 to more than $7.2 billion at the end of 2000, including a charge of about $6 billion to write off the Excite portal, which it had bought before AT&T acquired its stake. By January 2001, as the Internet bub- ble deflated, AtHome's stock price had declined to $7 a share; Cox and Comcast then exercised their put, forcing AT&T to pay more than $3 billion to buy their shares. (At around the same time, Somers had structured a similarly unfortunate deal with AT&T's partners in AT&T Canada. One might have understood if Armstrong or the board of directors had instructed the maintenance staff to remove the "p," "u," and "t" keys from his computer keyboard.) In June 200I, facing a liquidity crisis, AtHome borrowed $100 mil- lion from a group of "vu