Verizon Moves In For The Kill, $1B Discount To Buy Yahoo Or No Deal

It would seem Verizon is not willing to let the opportunity to save some money to acquire Yahoo Inc. With the privacy scandal that the online company is facing at the moment, it was only to be expected. Now, the telco wants to slash $1 billion off the buying price, reducing the amount offered to a measly $3.8 billion.

The original amount that Verizon was meant to shell out to acquire Yahoo was $4.8 billion, the New York Post reports. This was before Reuters released a report implicating the online company on a spying scandal at the behest of the U.S. government. Now, Verizon is asking for a steep discount according to inside sources.

The source indicated that the bosses at the telecommunication company are getting nervous about all the issues that Yahoo is getting involved with. First was the 500 million email information stolen back in 2014 and only revealed recently. Now, it turns out that the site was actually invading the privacy of its users for the NSA and FBI.

It was all apparently getting too much, thus prompting Tim Armstong to supposedly consider backing out of the deal. Barring that, they would ask for a discount worth almost a quarter of the original asking price.

To be fair, Verizon does have every right to consider asking for a new deal since Yahoo did not provide them with full disclosure when the $4.8 billion price was decided, Tech Crunch notes. M&A law expert Frank Aquila told the publication as much, which makes Yahoo’s reduced value not that surprising.

Now, it’s worth noting that this could be all empty bluster on the part of Verizon as it desperately wants to compete with Facebook and Google in terms of collecting on ad revenue. By fusing AOL and Yahoo, the company could have enough clout to actually be a force to reckon with.