I’ve recently seen this news:
Yahoo and AOL, kings of the early internet, saw their fortunes decline as Silicon Valley raced ahead to create new digital platforms. Google replaced Yahoo. AOL was supplanted by cable giants.
Now they will become the property of private equity. Verizon, their current owner, agreed to sell them to Apollo Global Management in a deal worth $5 billion, the companies announced Monday.
The business housing the two brands, Verizon Media, is to be renamed (yet again) to Yahoo (sans the brand’s stylized exclamation point), and the sale will also include its advertising technology business. Verizon will retain a 10 percent stake in the newly formed media group, the company said in a statement.
From here: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5 Billion – The New York Times.
In 2008 I was working for Yahoo! in Romania. I was there for a year, until early 2009.
Around the time they hired me, Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo! for $33 per share, at an effective price of about $46B. Jarry Yang, the Yahoo! co-founder and then-CEO, said he wanted at least $37 per share. Microsoft ended the bid around May 2008. Then the 2008 crash came and Yahoo! never quite got to the value it had again (except a short period in 2013).
Jerry Yang got sacked soon and this actually impacted me, because the new CEO (Carol Bartz) decided to close the push to extend the company in Eastern Europe and, by extension, they didn’t need me there anymore. Which was actually a good thing for me at that time, since I was kinda disenchanted with working in a big corporation, I had my own projects, and I wanted to just leave. But I might have stayed longer, because being the “Yahoo! representative in Romania” was a big thing then in a country where Yahoo! Messenger reigned supreme.
Well, what goes up, must come down.
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