Who are the Apollo funds that bought Yahoo?
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 on the table was Verizon Media, the division that held Yahoo and AOL. Verizon took $4.25 billion in cash and $750 million in preferred interests, and held on to a 10 percent stake in the business. The deal closed later that year.
Apollo renamed the whole company Yahoo at closing, which is why the AOL brand stopped being 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 ownership split has not moved since. Apollo controls the large majority through its funds, Verizon keeps its minority slice, and there are no public shareholders, no ticker and no quarterly earnings calls.
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 Verizon had renegotiated downward after Yahoo disclosed two enormous data breaches during the deal process. Chief executive Marissa Mayer resigned the day it closed, leaving with a package CNBC reported in 2017 at about $23 million.
Verizon then poured the Yahoo sites into a new subsidiary called Oath, alongside AOL, and put former AOL chief Tim Armstrong in charge. The idea 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 later renamed Verizon Media, the advertising share never arrived, and by 2021 Verizon was a phone company that wanted to be a phone company.
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 haunts 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 it said so in a press release filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
"After careful evaluation, the Board believes that Microsoft's proposal substantially undervalues Yahoo!" the statement read on February 11, 2008, listing the global brand, the worldwide audience, recent investments in advertising platforms and the stakes in other companies as the reasons the price was too low.
Microsoft eventually walked away. 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 the rejected offer. 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 that followed.
What has Apollo sold off since 2021?
Private equity owners tend to 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. In October 2025 Apollo agreed to sell it to Bending Spoons, an Italian software group that had already bought Vimeo and Evernote, for roughly $1.5 billion. That is a striking price for a brand that had been the headline asset in a much larger deal a generation earlier.
Other properties that arrived with the 2021 purchase have been sold to media investors as well, leaving Apollo with the Yahoo-branded consumer sites and the advertising technology underneath them.
Some of what the old portal carried is simply gone rather than sold. Yahoo Answers is closed, and the directory, the chat rooms and the personal home pages went years before it.
What remains is narrower and, by every outside account, a great deal healthier than the sprawling collection Verizon tried to run.
Is Yahoo still a real business in 2026?
Yes, and the traffic is the argument. Semafor reported in May 2025, citing Similarweb, that Yahoo was among the internet's five busiest destinations, with about 3 billion visits in the previous month, more than Amazon.
That traffic does not come from people browsing a 1990s directory. It comes from Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo News and Yahoo Search, products that millions of Americans open by habit every morning without thinking of them as retro.
Jim Lanzone, Yahoo's chief executive, has spent his tenure pushing the company into artificial intelligence rather than defending the portal, and he has been open about the stakes. "If we don't innovate and get out ahead of it, we die," he told Semafor in 2025, comparing executives who ignore the shift to the characters in Don't Look Up who tune out a warning.
So the answer to the ownership question has two halves. Apollo Global Management owns Yahoo, and Yahoo is not a museum piece. It is a private, profitable-enough media and advertising business that happens to carry one of the oldest brand names on the web.
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 later that year. Verizon retained a 10 percent stake. 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, still operating Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo News and Yahoo Search under chief executive Jim Lanzone. Semafor reported in May 2025 that Yahoo was one of the internet's five busiest destinations, with about 3 billion visits in 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, and Microsoft later withdrew. Yahoo's operating business was sold to Verizon for $4.48 billion in 2017 and to Apollo Global Management for about $5 billion in 2021.