Verizon closes $4.5B acquisition of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer resigns

A list of Marissa Mayer&#x27;s&#x2F;Yahoo&#x27;s accomplisments with her at the helm....<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;marissamayr.tumblr.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;161775943139&#x2F;nostalgia-gratitude-optimism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;marissamayr.tumblr.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;161775943139&#x2F;nostalgia-g...</a><p>Even though all of these gains, plus more as core yahoo lost value was from Alibaba this does look impressive at a first glance.....<p>&gt; We oversaw the creation $43B in market capitalization and shareholder value. Our market cap has gone from $18B to $51B (increasing our valuation by $33B), while we returned nearly $10B in cash to shareholders.<p>Sadly the list of employee gains seems very spartan compared to the shareholder gains.<p>For those of you wondering what the Yahoo&#x2F;Altaba shell contains now...<p>- approximately 15 percent equity stake in China’s Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.,<p>- about 36 percent in Yahoo Japan Corp.,<p>- cash and marketable debt securities,<p>- certain minority investments and Excalibur IP, which owns some patent assets.

Her mega-salary, like that of other comparable executives, is decided by other mega-rich people. It&#x27;s no hardship for them to hand her (one of their own) enough cash to buy a small town.<p>Let&#x27;s ponder that $260M compared to every time an outgoing job offer was dialed down from $145K to $135K. Or when the yearly bonus for a rank and file is a healthy $25K (1&#x2F;1000th her accumulated comp).<p>Sour grapes? Yes, and why not? We&#x27;re all giving our lives to these same companies.

I have disliked her ever since being influenced by this gawker screed some years back:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gawker.com&#x2F;5162532&#x2F;marissa-mayer-googles-biggest-failure" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gawker.com&#x2F;5162532&#x2F;marissa-mayer-googles-biggest-fail...</a>.<p>Subsequent reporting has hardend my opinion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;12&#x2F;21&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;what-happened-when-marissa-mayer-tried-to-be-steve-jobs.html?_r=0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;12&#x2F;21&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;what-happened-wh...</a><p>I have tried to examine what role gender plays in my visceral dislike for Marissa Mayer. I hope it is a small one. I give myself some consolation that I recoil almost equally when reading any news coverage of Travis Kalanick.

I find it interesting that the comments section of the WSJ (a pretty capitalist-friendly corner of the internet) is filled with complaints about Mayer&#x27;s &quot;overpay&quot; as CEO and outrage over her &quot;golden parachute,&quot; while HN (a much less capitalist-friendly corner of the internet) has gone through 40 comments and I&#x27;ve only seen a couple questioning her pay as CEO, and several comments praising her job in the role.<p>Take away Marissa Mayer from this story, and replace her with a generic CEO, and I&#x27;m not sure we&#x27;d see the same mood in either comment section.<p>Why is this? Is this because she&#x27;s from Google? Because she&#x27;s a former engineer? Because she&#x27;s a female CEO? Is she just a politically polarizing topic ala Elon Musk?<p>Genuinely curious. Anyone have any ideas?

Coming soon: All Verizon phones will contain tons of Yahoo crap and use Yahoo by default.

I really wonder what the ultimate fate of Flickr and Tumblr will be, especially the latter since the acquisition was deemed &quot;essentially worthless&quot; lol

Congratulations to Marissa on a job well done. That boat was a sinking ship that no one wanted to captain, and she kept it alive long enough to a satisfactory outcome.

Kind of a sad day for me. Yahoo was so instrumental in the early web where I cut my teeth. Seeing it now sold to some telecom giant at around what a handful of unprofitable mobile apps go for is a bit depressing. For Millenials, imagine if Google was sold to AT&amp;T 5-10 years from now after beaten by hungrier competitors. I guess all these companies fold eventually but Yahoo had quite the terminal illness and it lasted far longer than I assumed and often with bouncebacks that made you think things were getting better.<p>Perhaps Verizon can do something useful with the brand, but the Yahoo I knew is dead and probably has been since Mayer took over. She was brought in as a hatchet-woman to get an acquisition and got the job done.

When she took over, there were numerous articles about how Yahoo&#x27;s core business had negative value (the business plus the Alibaba investment was worth less than the Alibaba investment).<p>Since then she&#x27;s given a lot of cash to shareholders, raised the stock price, and is selling the &quot;negative value&quot; core business for $4.5 billion.<p>That&#x27;s an astounding success.

If anyone knows what impact Verizon&#x27;s ownership will have on Flickr, please could you share?<p>I&#x27;ve been on Flickr for a <i>long</i> time now and it works well for me, should I be worried?

&gt; As expected, Marissa Mayer, who had been the CEO of Yahoo and recently received a $23 million ‘golden parachute’ for her work there.<p>Nice!<p>I dream of a day when the Engineers who make the Tech Company what it is, are also offered &#x27;Golden Parachutes&#x27; as part of a Job Offer.

I give it about 3 years until Verizon unloads it onto someone else for half the price.

I&#x27;ve said it before, and I&#x27;ll say it again.<p>Marissa Mayer took on a shit job to pull a losing company out of a hole. She knew what she was getting into, and she knew what was going to happen.<p>She deserves every penny for the reputation hit that she&#x27;s taking over this. This entire thread is why she deserves the money. Most people in tech hate her for some reason. (Let&#x27;s guess what that could be . . .)<p>Good for her for bargaining well and pulling a dream deal out of an assclown.<p>Yahoo was a joke when she took over, and now when she leaves it&#x27;s a much more valuable joke. On paper, at least. But still a joke.<p>If you&#x27;re going to leave google to run the laughing stock of the internet, you damn well better get paid the big bucks to get it sold for more than it has any right to be worth.<p>Good for her.<p>&lt;shameless pandering&gt; (Also, if you&#x27;re reading, Marissa, hit me up. I know you&#x27;re going to start something up soon. No way you are just going to sit still.) &lt;&#x2F;shameless pandering&gt;

I am still waiting for Silicon Valley TV show to pick up this vast subject of Myer&#x27;s tenure at Yahoo into one of its episodes.

They should probably just end all fantasy baseball leagues for this year too. I&#x27;d hate to have this year count.<p>In all seriousness, Yahoo! has done an amazing job with their fantasy sports.

I thought the job of a CEO was to increase shareholder value. Yahoo stock is up roughly 230% since she was officially signed on as CEO. Sounds like she did her job to me.

Verizon is combining the AOL and Yahoo operations and calling the new organization &quot;Oath&quot;

I for one hope this works out well, more diversity is good for consumers. IMHO, anything that chips away at the dominance of Google and Facebook are positive too.

Marissa Mayer was already on the sinking ship - but I admire her ambition on trying to make that thing work. God speed on her future en-devours for sure.

I can&#x27;t help but think about the Microsoft buyout offer back in 2008. From a $44 billion dollar offer to an offer 1&#x2F;10th the value 9 years later.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2008&#x2F;02&#x2F;01&#x2F;wow-microsoft-offers-446-billion-to-acquire-yahoo&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2008&#x2F;02&#x2F;01&#x2F;wow-microsoft-offers-446-b...</a>

&gt; <i>Those who are keeping jobs in the media division in the newly merged operation include Jared Grusd leading the News vertical (including yahoo.com, aol.com, HuffPost, and Yahoo News); Geoff Reiss leading the Sports vertical; David Karp leading the People and Community vertical (including Tumblr, Polyvore, Cabana, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo View, and Kanvas); Andy Serwer leading Finance media (including Yahoo Finance and Autoblog); Michael LaGuardia leading Finance product and utilities; Ned Desmond leading TechCrunch and Engadget; Alex Wallace leading OTT video production &amp; distribution as well as lifestyle &amp; entertainment (that includes BUILD, RYOT, Yahoo Celebrity, Yahoo Style, Yahoo BeuYahoo TV, Yahoo Movies, Yahoo Music, and Yahoo Entertainment); Dave Bottoms heading up distribution products (Newsroom and video OTT products) as well as growth, monetization, and syndication; Tim Tully leading all of engineering; Dave McDowell leading subscriptions, commerce, and customer care (including Yahoo Shopping and AOL Shopping); and Mary Bui-Pham leading our operations (including design, UXRA, analytics, and program management).</i><p>The problem with consolidations like this into bigger and bigger conglomerates is that it reduces editorial independence in favor of a false sense of corporate unification among all the &quot;verticals&quot;. The heavy and overweight company has a &quot;great&quot; vision which involves being everything to everybody. But that never works. End result will likely end up providing a lukewarm mediocrity in them all.<p>What Yahoo probably should have done was divest; instead it allowed itself to be swallowed whole by an ISP whose sole goal (as evidenced with its malfeasance to destroy Net Neutrality) is be able to selectively prioritize traffic in the ways that are most profitable to them... Ergo, the objective of this kind of empire is not to track down the truth and inform people about what is really going on, but to entertain and distract.

What if Mayer&#x27;s actual role was determined by Google? could it have simply been &quot;keep them alive so we&#x27;re not viewed as a monopoly&quot;? Or maybe &quot;put them out of business but make it look good&quot;?<p>I don&#x27;t think that anything quite so evil went on but you have to wonder, given Mayer&#x27;s investment in Google, whether there weren&#x27;t sub-conscious components to her decision making. One advantage to hiring a successful CEO from another industry is the lack of this background (of course, one of the disadvantages is Scully).

She should become COO of Uber. Perfect!

What do you think is going to happen to Tumblr?<p>Tumblr has a massive audience, but some of the worst tech among the social media, and now it seems like it might get abandoned completely. So people will eventually migrate to something else, right?<p>What can other platforms, like Medium, do about this? If you had a platofrm that might be valuable for a similar usecase(though, hopefully, much better), what would you be doing right now? Any ideas or advice?

Didn&#x27;t Microsoft extend a $40+B (however hostile) bid a decade ago or so? I&#x27;m still at a loss as to why Jang et al didn&#x27;t sell then...

1996-2017. Rip. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;goo.gl&#x2F;images&#x2F;WYRMqj" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;goo.gl&#x2F;images&#x2F;WYRMqj</a>

Question - Can someone explain the $4.5B valuation of Yahoo-Verizon deal versus the $49.46B Market cap of Yahoo! Inc. ticker on Nasdaq. Thanks.

Yahoo thought the media they provided users was important, Google thought user data was important -- it&#x27;s possible Mayer tried to bring some of Google to Yahoo. But I don&#x27;t think it was enough to bring Yahoo anywhere close to competing.

For 2 weeks now I&#x27;m fighting an enormous amount of spam that start popping up from nowhere and I did trail-back in my memory to not find a single instance in last 3 months where I would give out my email address to anyone new.<p>Its insane how much of it goes to my direct mailbox right in front of my eyes! Some even have &quot;viagra&quot; word in subjects, they come from weird addresses like hJGabtmDwbaiaJUsgUNiepwwUzDUUdanBHFpiMEghzLKNsotQTbrhZdpDzCHFWatqQB@perico.hunmooth.com and open up with images and everything ready for my click.<p>I suspect Verizon is already working hard on break the remaining thing that worked fine until now - yahoo mailbox.<p>But I&#x27;m fine with that. I had it in my pipeline to move out of them for so long now another incentive to actually do so :)

I noticed the YHOO stock ticker is still active. Is that now the empty shell that still has the Alibaba stake, or something else entirely?

Does anyone know any significative achievement made by Mayer in Yahoo?

The whole Net Neutrality situation just got more interesting.

&quot;Ye to hona hi tha &quot;<p>English : this was going to happen anyway

Another empire fall down. Bless!

does this mean i should stop using Flickr as backup?

Wow

Savvy PR move doing this on the same day the Uber report drops and Jeff Sessions testifies in the Senate

Whoa! The beginning of the end of the end.

I love how everyone here thinks they can do better. Yahoo was a deadman walking before she took over. Overall she did what she was suppose to do as a CEO of any company, return value to the shareholders. Now you can disagree with that being the goal, but it is the way it works today. By that measure it worked. Is it the right thing long term, most likely not. We have lost focus on long term planing in favor of quarterly reporting. It is the world we live in. Please go can change it, but don&#x27;t sit here and say you could do better as I do not see any of you saying you have the job as a CEO of a multi-billion dollar company.<p>Oh, I expect this to get down voted to oblivion. Prove me wrong.