Verizon Buys Yahoo For “Chump Change”

Fortune calls it the “saddest $5B deal in tech history.” They write:

Yahoo was once the king of the Internet, a $125 billion behemoth as big in its time as Facebook or Google are today. Now it’s being sold to Verizon for comparative chump change.

On Monday morning, Yahoo is expected to announce the end of the long process to extricate itself from a mess of its own making with a sale of its core business to Verizon for just under $5 billion, according to multiple reports.

The transaction ends the independence of one of Silicon Valley’s most iconic pioneering companies. Yahoo’s seventh and final CEO, Marissa Mayer, will reportedly depart with severence pay worth more than $50 million.

The sale will unite Yahoo with another fallen star, AOL, the first web portal Verizon bought last year for $4.4 billion.

The United States’ largest wireless provider is betting nearly $10 billion that combining the two formerly dominant websites will give it an edge in mobile content and advertising technology it can leverage across its more than 140 million subscribers.