The $9 billion Verizon Media misadventure. From the 2015 AOL acquisition through the 2017 Yahoo acquisition, the Oath rebrand, the $4.6B writedown, and the 2021 Apollo sale for $5B — one of the most-studied corporate strategic failures of the modern U.S. media era.
The 2013 Marissa Mayer logo rebrand was one of the most-mocked corporate identity refreshes of the 2010s — and is now the textbook case in how a logo refresh cannot fix a brand with structural commercial problems.
The full five-year arc of Marissa Mayer's tenure as Yahoo CEO — from the July 2012 hire through aggressive acquisitions, the remote-work decision, the logo refresh, security breach disclosures, the 2017 sale to Verizon, and her $186M departure package.
The March 2012 Yahoo patent suit against Facebook — the canonical example of how patent litigation between operating competitors signals corporate decline. The 10-20 patents, the cross-licensing settlement, and what the suit foretold about the 2017 Verizon sale.