What exactly did Apollo buy in 2021?
Yahoo is owned by funds managed by affiliates of Apollo Global Management, a New York investment firm that runs private equity and credit money for pension plans, insurers and endowments.
Apollo announced the purchase on May 3, 2021 and valued it at about $5 billion. The asset was Verizon Media, the division that held both Yahoo and AOL. Verizon took $4.25 billion in cash and $750 million in preferred interests and kept a 10 percent stake. The deal closed on September 1, 2021, which left Apollo with roughly 90 percent.
Apollo renamed the whole company Yahoo at closing, which is why AOL stopped being part of the parent name and went back to being one property among several.
The firm was explicit about the thesis. "We are big believers in the growth prospects of Yahoo and the macro tailwinds driving growth in digital media, advertising technology and consumer internet platforms," David Sambur, co-head of private equity at Apollo, said in the May 2021 announcement.
That split has not moved since. Apollo controls the large majority through its funds, Verizon keeps its minority slice, and there is no ticker, no public float and no quarterly earnings call.
Why Verizon gave up on the portal it had just bought
Verizon owned Yahoo for four years and sold it for roughly what it paid, which tells you how the experiment went.
The purchase closed on June 13, 2017 at $4.48 billion, a price CNBC reported Verizon had negotiated downward after Yahoo disclosed two enormous data breaches during the deal process. Chief executive Marissa Mayer resigned the day it closed.
Verizon poured the Yahoo sites into a new subsidiary called Oath, alongside AOL, and put former AOL chief Tim Armstrong in charge. The plan was to build a third advertising pillar next to Google and Facebook out of two brands that had already peaked.
It did not work. Oath was renamed Verizon Media in 2019, the advertising share never arrived, and by 2021 Verizon wanted to be a phone company again.
The corporate shell left over from the 2017 sale kept the Alibaba and Yahoo Japan stakes, renamed itself Altaba, sold down those holdings and wound itself up. The operating business and the name went one way, the investments went another.
How a $44.6 billion offer turned into a $4.48 billion sale
The number that follows every Yahoo ownership question is the one the company said no to.
On February 1, 2008 Microsoft made an unsolicited offer to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion in cash and stock. Ten days later the board turned it down and said so in a statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
"After careful evaluation, the Board believes that Microsoft's proposal substantially undervalues Yahoo!" the February 11, 2008 filing read, listing the global brand, the worldwide audience, recent investments in advertising platforms and the stakes in other companies among the reasons the price was too low.
Microsoft withdrew the offer later in 2008. Yahoo stayed independent, cycled through chief executives, and nine years later sold its entire operating business to Verizon for $4.48 billion, roughly a tenth of what Microsoft had put on the table. Four years after that it changed hands again for about $5 billion.
The Microsoft bid was not the only chance Yahoo let go. The company also passed on the search engine that became Google, a decision that shaped everything after it.
What has Apollo sold off since 2021?
Private equity owners sort a portfolio into the parts that earn and the parts that distract, and Apollo has done exactly that with Yahoo.
The biggest piece to go was AOL. Apollo agreed in October 2025 to sell it to Bending Spoons, an Italian software group that had already bought Vimeo and Evernote. Bending Spoons told the Securities and Exchange Commission, in a registration statement filed in 2026, that it acquired all of AOL Holdco I LLC on January 2, 2026 for $1.45 billion.
That is a striking price for a brand that had been the headline asset in a far larger deal a generation earlier, and it means the Yahoo that Apollo owns in 2026 does not include AOL at all.
Some of what the old portal carried is gone rather than sold. Yahoo Answers closed in 2021, and the directory, the chat rooms and the personal home pages went years before it.
What remains is narrower than the collection Verizon tried to run: the Yahoo-branded consumer sites and the advertising technology underneath them.
Is Yahoo still a real business in 2026?
Yes. Yahoo is private, profitable by its own account, and still one of the most visited sets of sites in the United States.
When Yahoo launched its AI answer engine on January 27, 2026, it put its audience at about 700 million people a month worldwide and about 250 million in the United States. Those visits come from Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo News and Yahoo Search rather than from anything resembling a 1990s directory.
The answer engine is called Scout. It opened in beta for United States readers at scout.yahoo.com and inside the Yahoo Search apps for iOS and Android, built on models licensed from Anthropic alongside Microsoft Bing results, and it answers with links out to the pages it used.
Jim Lanzone, who became chief executive in 2021 after running Tinder and Ask.com, has been blunt about why he took the job. Yahoo has "always been the white whale of turnarounds for me," he told Fortune in March 2026.
So the ownership answer has two halves. Apollo Global Management owns Yahoo, and Yahoo is not a museum piece.
Will Yahoo go public again?
Maybe, and it is the question that decides who owns Yahoo next.
Apollo is a buyout firm, and buyout firms exit. The obvious routes are a sale to another company or an initial public offering that would give Yahoo a ticker for the first time since Verizon bought the operating business in 2017.
MediaPost reported in February 2026 that Yahoo had not filed for an offering, and that analysts and internal estimates pointed to a valuation of $20 billion or more if it did. Against the roughly $5 billion Apollo paid in 2021, that would be a good trade.
Lanzone has said for several years that he would like Yahoo to be publicly traded again, without committing to a date, and Apollo has not announced one either. Until that changes, the answer to the ownership question stays the same: Apollo Global Management, with Verizon holding 10 percent.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who owns Yahoo now?
Yahoo is owned by funds managed by affiliates of Apollo Global Management, which announced the roughly $5 billion purchase of Verizon Media on May 3, 2021 and completed it on September 1, 2021. Apollo holds about 90 percent and Verizon kept 10 percent. Yahoo has had no publicly traded shares since the deal closed.
Is Yahoo still a company in 2026?
Yes. Yahoo is a privately held company in 2026, running Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo News and Yahoo Search under chief executive Jim Lanzone. Yahoo launched an AI answer engine called Scout on January 27, 2026 and put its worldwide audience at about 700 million people a month.
Did Microsoft try to buy Yahoo?
Microsoft made an unsolicited offer of $44.6 billion for Yahoo on February 1, 2008. Yahoo's board rejected it on February 11, 2008, saying the proposal substantially undervalued the company. Yahoo's operating business was later sold to Verizon for $4.48 billion in 2017 and to Apollo Global Management for about $5 billion in 2021.