How Did Apollo Buy Yahoo From Verizon?

Jim Lanzone says he was not at Apollo when the firm decided to buy Yahoo. Verizon had bought AOL and then Yahoo, merged them into a company first called Oath and later Verizon Media, and a later management team decided it did not want that business. It took a few years to find a buyer at a price that worked. Reed Rayman, a leader of Apollo's private equity group, built a structure Verizon would accept. Verizon still owns 10 percent of Yahoo.

Molly O'Shea puts the price for AOL and Yahoo together near 5 billion dollars, in a range of about 4.5 to 4.8 billion. Jim says Verizon had paid about twice that for the two companies, and the mission inside Verizon was to help grow 5G rather than to run Yahoo on its own terms. Apollo agreed in May 2021 and closed in September 2021. The company that holds the brands was stood up from scratch. It is a five-year-old company managing a 30-year-old brand. Jim started at the end of September 2021.