Yahoo: The Giant That Passed on Google for $1 Million and Fell

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Yahoo could have bought Google for $1 million in 1998. It declined. Ten years later it turned down $44.6 billion from Microsoft as too little, then sold its core business to Verizon for $4.83 billion. This episode reads the company's life as a corporate tragedy, beginning in January 1994, when Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo built a human-edited directory called Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web. Renamed Yahoo, it became the front door of the early internet, and its stock peaked at $118.75 in January 2000.

After the dot-com crash, the company never settled whether it was a search engine, a technology firm, or a media portal. That confusion drove a carousel of chief executives, costly acquisitions like Tumblr, a punishing ranking system under Marissa Mayer, and neglected security that exposed every user account. The episode closes with the Verizon sale, the Altaba spinoff, and the brand's long fade under Apollo.

• In 2002 CEO Terry Semel offered $3 billion for Google, and Yahoo walked away when Google asked for $5 billion.
• Scott Thompson was fired after 130 days over a discrepancy on his resume and left with at least $7.3 million. Carol Bartz was fired by phone in 2011.
• A 2013 breach was eventually found to have hit all three billion accounts, and a 2014 attack used forged web cookies to bypass passwords, prompting Verizon to cut $350 million from its price.
• Yahoo gave Chinese authorities user information that led to prison terms for dissidents, including Shi Tao, sentenced to 10 years in 2005.
• The company shut down GeoCities in 2009, erasing millions of early personal web pages, while its most valuable holdings turned out to be stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan.