Overview
Altaba Inc. was a non-diversified, closed-end management investment company based in New York City that was formed from the remains of the first incarnation of Yahoo! Inc. after Verizon acquired old Yahoo's Internet business. Verizon completed its acquisition on June 13, 2017, and put the assets under a new subsidiary named Yahoo! Holdings within its newly created division, Oath (now the current incarnation of Yahoo! Inc.). After the transaction, Yahoo! Inc. had no operating business but retained its cash holdings, partnership investments and bond portfolio, as well as certain patents that Verizon did not purchase. It reorganized as an investment fund and changed its name to Altaba Inc. on June 16. The only Yahoo! - branded interest held by Altaba was its stake in the joint venture Yahoo! Japan, which it sold to the SoftBank Group in late 2018.
History
1994–2017: Yahoo! Inc.
In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo, who were Electrical Engineering graduate students, created a website named "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web". The Guide was a directory of other websites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. In April 1994, Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web was renamed "Yahoo!". The word "YAHOO" is a backronym for "Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle" or "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle." The yahoo.com domain was created on January 18, 1995.
Yahoo! grew rapidly throughout the 1990s and diversified into a web portal, followed by numerous high-profile acquisitions. The company's stock price skyrocketed during the dot-com bubble and closed at an all-time high of US$118.75 in 2000; however, after the dot-com bubble burst, it reached an all-time low of US$8.11 in 2001. Yahoo! formally rejected an acquisition bid from the Microsoft Corporation in 2008. In early 2012, the largest layoff in Yahoo!'s history was completed and 2,000 employees (14 percent of the workforce) lost their jobs.
From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).