Yahoo CEO Mayer to exit board with Verizon sale
Company to be renamed Altaba
San Francisco — Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, co-founder David Filo and others plan to resign from the company’s board when it completes its $4.8 billion sale to Verizon.
The high-profile Mayer, who was brought in to save the internet icon in 2012; Filo, who cofounded the company at Stanford University in 1994; board chairman Maynard Webb; and three others are departing. It is unclear, however, if Mayer, a native of Wausau, will remain in some capacity.
Eric Brandt, a new member of Yahoo’s 11member board, was named chairman immediately.
In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing late Tuesday, Yahoo said the resignations are “not due to any disagreement with the Company on any matter relating to the Company’s operations, policies or practices.”
The filing also said the company would be renamed Altaba after the Verizon deal closes.
Mayer’s absence from the new company’s board is not surprising at all, said Gil Luria, managing director for equities research at Wedbush Securities in Los Angeles.
“Altaba will not be an operating company and therefore there is very little for her to be involved in,” he said.
Luria theorized that Altaba, whose value is mostly made up of Yahoo’s Alibaba stake, will likely be unwound over time by selling the Alibaba and Yahoo Japan stakes to investors.
“The only consideration slowing that sale down would be tax consequences to shareholders who have seen the Alibaba stake appreciate considerably since Yahoo bought the stake,” he said.
The Yahoo-Verizon deal has been starcrossed since it was announced in July 2016.
Last week, a senior Verizon executive who was instrumental in the telecom company’s planned purchase of Yahoo’s internet business expressed doubts over the deal, the second top exec to raise the specter of a changed or abandoned takeover.
“I can’t sit here today and say with confidence one way or another because we still don’t know,” Marni Walden, president of product innovation and new businesses at Verizon, said when asked about determining whether the deal gets done. She did, however, tell attendees at an investment bank conference in Las Vegas that the deal made sense.
Verizon execs have been unsettled by two disclosed digital breaches by Yahoo that have affected more than 1 billion of its member accounts dating back several years.
Yahoo has also struggled to land digital advertising in the face of withering competition from larger rivals Google and Facebook.