Yahoo!, the internet pioneer once valued at more than $100 billion, is officially no more, changing its name to Altaba. On Monday, the company filed a registration statement on Form N-2 with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It’s now a publicly traded, non-diversified, closed-end management investment company, according to RTT News.
The name change comes days after Yahoo completed the sale of its operating business to Verizon Communications for about $4.48 billion.
Also as of Monday, Altaba started trading on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol “AABA.” Altaba is effectively a holding company for Yahoo’s 15.5% stake in the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. It also owns a 35.5% stake in Yahoo Japan.
The former Yahoo business, now owned by Verizon, will become part of a separate Verizon unit called Oath, which includes another internet dinosaur, AOL. The Verizon sale included Yahoo’s digital properties — fantasy sports, finance, and news — as well as Tumblr, Flickr, and Yahoo Mail. Verizon expects to lay off up to 2,100 employees from the combined digital company, CNN reported.
The Verizon deal marked the end of the line for CEO Marissa Mayer, who left Google to lead the turnaround at Yahoo. She is reportedly walking away with $260 million.
“She had a fairly good run, but got all the bad breaks,” Bill Klepper, a management professor at Columbia Graduate School of Business, told USA Today. “How can you stop a Russian hacker? And she got hit twice.”
“Looking back on my time at Yahoo, we have confronted seemingly insurmountable business challenges, along with many surprise twists and turns,” Mayer wrote in a Tumblr post. She said Yahoo had successfully navigated challenges, “and mountains in ways that have not only made Yahoo a better company, but also made all of us far stronger.”