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AOL content head Arianna Huffington turned the tables a bit on TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington today, revealing that the Huffington Post and TechCrunch were in talks to merge long before AOL bought both companies.
Arrington had initially tried to put Huffington in the hot seat today at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, but her reference to their merger talks came as a bit of a curveball to him. “I didn’t really want to talk about this part,” he said, while visibly uncomfortable and trying to move the conversation off of TechCrunch.
Huffington said that the talks ended when she realized that buying TechCrunch would have been too expensive at the time.
AOL bought TechCrunch last September and announced it would buy The Huffington Post in February for $315 million. The deal put Huffington in charge of AOL’s content lineup as president of the Huffington Post Media Group and also made her Arrington’s boss.
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