In 1994, Ted Leonsis was the head of the new media marketing firm he created, Redgate Communications, spun out six years earlier from a CD-ROM based computer shopping business. Redgate dealed in digital media—sometimes called new media—new territory in the marketing world. And he was pretty good at it. That year, he went out to lunch with one his investment bankers, Dan Case. Case mentioned that his brother Steve was working at a small internet company looking to bring internet services to the mainstream. They had only just finished rebranding to a new name, with a new purpose, America Online.
90s "prosperity" was entirely fake, still being driven by the "reaganomics" of the 80s, and were the peak before the long, drawn out collapse you're seeing now that actually started in the 70s but we had managed to stave off. 9/11 was the beginning of the end.