Yahoo wants to change its name to Altaba after the sale of its internet portal to Verizon is completed. On Monday, in a regulatory filing, Yahoo said that CEO Marissa Mayer and co-founder David Filo also will leave the company.
Verizon agreed to buy the company for $4.8 billion in July 2016, it planned to purchase just the core Internet businesses of Yahoo, which include its email service, sports verticals and various apps.
Once that deal is complete, Yahoo will become an investment company and the board will be reduced from 11 to 5 people. The main holdings of Altaba will be stakes in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and major Japanese Internet portal Yahoo Japan.
The deal with Verizon has been under a cloud since Yahoo disclosed two major breaches of its user database. The latest, which was disclosed in December 2016 but which happened three years earlier, involved the theft of details on a billion users. That makes it the largest internet data breach ever disclosed.
As per a person familiar with the company’s thinking that the new name is a combination of the words “alternative and Alibaba. Today Yahoo owns roughly 15 percent of Alibaba, holdings that are worth about $35 billion. The idea behind the name is that Altaba’s stock can now be tracked as an alternative to Alibaba because Yahoo owns a sizeable chunk of the Chinese company.
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