Yahoo Said No to $44.6 Billion. Then It Lost Everything.

In 1998, two Stanford students offered to sell their search engine to Yahoo for a reported $1 million. Yahoo passed. In 2002 it tried to buy them back for about $3 billion. In 2006 it offered around $1 billion for Facebook. In 2008 it turned down $44.6 billion from Microsoft. In 2017, the front page of the internet was sold for $4.48 billion. This is the story of how Yahoo was handed the future again and again — and kept waiting for a better price. CHAPTERS 0:00 Four offers, four no's 1:18 The List 4:08 Two Students 5:49 Top of the World 6:55 Hollywood 8:17 The Billion-Dollar No 10:08 Forty-Four Billion 11:43 The Revolving Door 13:38 Sold 14:41 Switched Off 15:48 What Are We? SOURCES NPR — "Yahoo rejects Microsoft bid" (Feb 2008); Al Jazeera — Microsoft withdraws Yahoo offer (May 2008) Wired (Fred Vogelstein), via "How Yahoo Blew It" — Yahoo's 2002 attempt to buy Google Business Insider — the companies that tried to buy Facebook (Yahoo, 2006) CNBC — Yahoo's core business valued below zero by one sum-of-the-parts calculation (Jan 2015) VentureBeat / Verizon & Yahoo — $350M price cut after the data breaches (Feb 2017) TechSpot — "What Went Wrong With Yahoo!" (company history, acquisitions, CEOs, Altaba, Apollo) MediaPost — "Is Yahoo Ready For Another IPO?" (Feb 2026) Figures as reported by these sources. Offers marked "reported" were never officially confirmed. FOOTAGE & IMAGE CREDITS Stock video: Pexels (Pexels License) — Acres of Film, Adailton Batista, Adam Fackelman, Andres Daza, Anete Lusina, Angus, Artem Podrez, ArtHouse Studio, BRoll.io, CityXcape, Computer_Scientist, cottonbro studio, Coverr, Dziana Hasanbekava, Engin Akyurt, faizan amjed, fauxels, Griffin Wooldridge, Harvey Tan Villarino, Kaboompics, Jack Sparrow, james, Julia M Cameron, K, KATRIN BOLOVTSOVA, Ketut Subiyanto, KoolShooters, LayG Traveller, Maciej Głowiński, Marc Espejo, MART PRODUCTION, Matthias Groeneveld, Miguel Á. Padriñán, Mikael Blomkvist, Mikhail Nilov, MrColo, Nazar Matveichev, Nino Souza, Nothing Ahead, olia danilevich, Ono Kosuki, Paice Street, Pavel Danilyuk, Pete Wales, Pixabay, Pressmaster, Quách Hải Thọ, Rafael Minguet Delgado, Ranjeet Chauhan, RDNE Stock project, Ricky Esquivel, Ron Lach, Samer Daboul, Stefan Kwiecinski, StefWithAnF, Taryn Elliott, Tianwang Xiao, Tim Samuel, Tima Miroshnichenko, TREEDEO.ST, Tyrone Sanders, Videogrammer .com, Vlada Karpovich, Wendy Laplume, Werner Pfennig, WeStarMoney Rec, Yan Krukau. Photos (Wikimedia Commons, cropped/graded): Stanford University Main Quad May 2011 001 — King of Hearts — CC BY-SA 3.0 Stanford University from Hoover Tower May 2011 001 — King of Hearts — CC BY-SA 3.0 David Filo and Jerry Yang — Mitchell Aidelbaum — CC BY 2.0 Google page brin — Ehud Kenan — CC BY 2.0 Google Main Page in 1998 — Google Inc. — Public domain Terry Semel (50187309) — JD Lasica — CC BY 2.0 The Yahoo! Search team — Yahoo — CC BY 2.0 MarkZuckerberg — Elaine Chan and Priscilla Chan — CC BY 2.5 Jack Ma (292160777) — JD Lasica — CC BY 2.0 Alibaba group Headquarters — Thomas Lombard — CC BY-SA 3.0 Jerry Yang (352582725) — JD Lasica — CC BY 2.0 Jerry Yang at Yahoo! TechPulse — Yahoo — CC BY 2.0 Steve Ballmer - MIX 2008 — Jesús Gorriti — CC BY-SA 2.0 One Microsoft Way (5536765210) — InSapphoWeTrust — CC BY-SA 2.0 Marissa Mayer, Search On 2010 — Robert Scoble — CC BY 2.0 Logos: Yahoo! (2009-2013), Google Logo (1998) — Wikimedia Commons, public domain (text logos). Licenses: creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 · /by/2.5 · /by-sa/2.0 · /by-sa/3.0 Music & sound design: original. All companies are named for commentary and news reporting only; this channel is not affiliated with any of them. Web pages, dialogs and search results shown in the video are recreations for illustration, not screenshots of the real sites.