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Verizon Closes $4.5B Acquisition of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer Resigns (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader shares a TechCrunch article: After Yahoo shareholder approval last week, Verizon today announced that it has finally closed its acquisition of Yahoo, which it plans to combine with its AOL assets into a subsidiary called Oath, covering some 50 media brands and 1 billion people globally. It will be led by Tim Armstrong, who was the CEO of AOL before this. As expected, Marissa Mayer, who had been the CEO of Yahoo, has resigned. "Given the inherent changes to Marissa Mayer's role with Yahoo resulting from the closing of the transaction, Mayer has chosen to resign from Yahoo. Verizon wishes Mayer well in her future endeavors," Verizon said in a statement. You can find Marissa in her own words here on Tumblr. It's a long list of the achievements made with her at the helm these last five years, and -- alas -- you will only read of the struggles that Yahoo went through between the lines. The deal, nevertheless, brings to a close the independent life of one of the oldest and most iconic internet brands, arguably the one that led and set the pace for search -- the cornerstone of doing business on the spaghetti-like internet -- at least until Google came along and surpassed Yahoo many times over, and led the company into a number of disastrous and costly attempts to redefine itself, ultimately culminating in the sale we have here today.
I'd be perfectly happy to drive your tech company into the ditch too for a couple hundred million dollars.
I don't normally ask this, but if she were a dude instead of a passably cute chick, would she have even lasted this long?
The Yahoo board booted Jerry Yang, but he was arguably worse than Marissa. Yahoo was in decline when she took over. She didn't fix the problems, but she didn't cause them either. By the time she took the reins, I am not sure that Yahoo was fixable.
1 in 5 CEOs are Psychopaths Not the murdering kind, of course. But the lack of empathy, the willingness to manipulate, and the self-aggrandizing are big things. Artists are often (but not always) polar opposites of the first two. Oh, and "writing code to be an art" is why a lot of code is a shitshow. Good art is rare. It's why there's so much more of a push towards science. Then the "art" is perfecting the application of science instead of it being 99% "creativity" and just enough science to get code to compile.
He probably is a billionaire. Forbes ranking of the wealthy (which is pretty well trusted) says he is. But he's not as rich as he says he is; he's blasted Forbes for rating his wealth at a fraction of what he claims. Forbes thinks he's worth $3.5 billion (down $200 million, as a matter of fact). Trump claims he's worth over $10 billion. I have yet to hear of anyone serious who believes that.
She is the only CEO of Yahoo that was able to seriously raise the stock price of the company. The company was on a long, slow decline for most of its existence. She pulled it out of its nose-dive long enough to make it worth buying. Not purchasing Google when they had the chance was their biggest mistake.