Verizon sold off 90% of its interest in Yahoo! and AOL, which V has owned since 2017 and 2015 respectively, to a group called Apollo Global Management. The companies sold combined for $5 billion, or for about $4 billion less than they were purchased for.
Engadget and TechCrunch are par of that deal along with some other sites. There’s no word on whether they’re going to do anything to bring about the reappearance of Yahoo Answers, which is slated to go away tomorrow.
For our youngest readers, AOL was where your grandparents probably met on a service you had to connect to by dialing a phone number and robots screaming at each other in rage before establishing a connection, and Yahoo was like Google that kept shooting itself in the foot rather than making a product everyone liked and discontinuing it again and again and again.
As of this writing stocks for Verizon (VZ) and Apollo Global Management (APO) appear to be effectively not particularly budging potentially indicating a severe lack of interest.
The move is heralded by many who were in my car this morning as “why would anyone buy that? Is this like that NFT thing you were trying to explain yesterday? Will someone give me five billion dollars for something they have to figure out how to make work?”
[CNN |GuruFocus]
