Yahoo's board of directors is meeting Wednesday through Friday to determine the company's fate, and the options include halting the proposed sale of Yahoo's lucrative stake in Chinese internet juggernaut Alibaba and selling off Yahoo's core internet properties, sources tell The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Yahoo Mail and Yahoo News are, taken together, the No. 3 most visited site on the internet, after Google and Facebook, but they represent a fraction of Yahoo's $31 billion market capitalization, perhaps less than zero.
Yahoo is one of the original internet giants, but it lost its footing and, apparently, its sense of direction in the mid-2000s. CEO Marissa Mayer was brought in from Google four years ago to turn around the company, but while she has stopped Yahoo's spiraling decline, she hasn't done much to reverse its fortunes. Most of Yahoo's value is from its 15 percent stake in Alibaba, worth $32 billion, and its 35 percent share of Yahoo Japan, worth $8.5 billion. Still, Yahoo's 210 million monthly visitors are worth something, and private equity and tech firms are said to be interested in buying the venerable web properties. In October, Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Youssef Squali valued Yahoo's core businesses at $3.9 billion.
"The saving grace for Yahoo is that it still has a relatively large user base that is reliant on the platform so long as they maintain email addresses there. It also has a still relatively strong (and still relatively large) sales force," Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser wrote to his clients Tuesday night. “As long as both of those factors remain in place, there would be time for an acquirer to establish new strategies and develop products while the property continues to generate cash flow."
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
5 museum-grade cartoons about Trump's Smithsonian purgeCartoons Artists take on institutional rebranding, exhibit interpretation, and more
-
Settling the West Bank: a death knell for a Palestine state?In the Spotlight The reality on the ground is that the annexation of the West Bank is all but a done deal
-
Crossword: August 23, 2025The Week's daily crossword puzzle
-
New York court tosses Trump's $500M fraud fineSpeed Read A divided appeals court threw out a hefty penalty against President Trump for fraudulently inflating his wealth
-
Trump said to seek government stake in IntelSpeed Read The president and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan reportedly discussed the proposal at a recent meeting
-
US to take 15% cut of AI chip sales to ChinaSpeed Read Nvidia and AMD will pay the Trump administration 15% of their revenue from selling artificial intelligence chips to China
-
NFL gets ESPN stake in deal with DisneySpeed Read The deal gives the NFL a 10% stake in Disney's ESPN sports empire and gives ESPN ownership of NFL Network
-
Samsung to make Tesla chips in $16.5B dealSpeed Read Tesla has signed a deal to get its next-generation chips from Samsung
-
FCC greenlights $8B Paramount-Skydance mergerSpeed Read The Federal Communications Commission will allow Paramount to merge with the Hollywood studio Skydance
-
Tesla reports plummeting profitsSpeed Read The company may soon face more problems with the expiration of federal electric vehicle tax credits
-
Dollar faces historic slump as stocks hit new highSpeed Read While stocks have recovered post-Trump tariffs, the dollar has weakened more than 10% this year
