Who Owns Yahoo
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Yahoo first launched in 1994, but the company has continually changed hands since then. After many ups and downs, Yahoo was acquired by Verizon in 2017 for $4.48 billion.
From the outset, Yahoo stood out from its competition when it was established by Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo, who started the search directory with a mere $2 million in the USD. Their index-style offerings were incredibly popular, and it wasn’t long before Yahoo outpaced its rivals and grew exponentially.
In 1999, Yahoo co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Tim Koogle negotiated a merger with e-commerce giant eBay. The goal was to begin selling online, but eBay eventually backed out of the deal.
In 2001, Yahoo changed hands again when media conglomerate Vivendi Universal acquired the company for $10 billion. A year later, Yahoo’s share price had plummeted, and Vivendi quickly sold off the majority of its stake just months later.
Yahoo bounced back with a string of small acquisitions of various companies, more notably the California-based blogging service Tumblr in 2013. But many felt that the $1 billion investment was a mistake and Yahoo eventually wrote off the investment in 2016.
In late 2016, Yahoo was the target of the largest data breach ever reported, exposing the personal information of more than 1 billion user accounts. What was worse, is that Yahoo had kept such a breach secret for years, leading to investigations and high-profile lawsuits.
At this point, Yahoo was more appealing as an acquisition target than as a standalone business and in 2017, Verizon stepped up and purchased the ailing tech giant for $4.48 billion. The Verizon-owned subsidiary, Oath, melded Yahoo with its existing AOL business, giving the telecom giant a larger presence on the web.
Today, the new company is focused on mobile strategies and AI, and the Yahoo brand is still intact, surprisingly enough. But Verizon is playing the long game in its business strategy, and Yahoo is just one of the many pieces to the puzzle. So regardless of what happens to the struggling internet pioneer, it’s unlikely that Yahoo will ever own itself again.