By Bob Meyer

In 2001, Yahoo boss Terry Semel met with Google’s two young founders, Larry Page and Sergei Brin, for dinner and talk turned to a possible deal between the two Internet companies.

Semel, the former movie mogul, said he was intrigued by the possibility, even though the founders confessed they didn’t have much of a plan about how their company would make money.

The pair said their company, which was just getting off the ground, was worth $1 billion but added they didn’t want to sell. Semel checked in with them a week or so later. They told him Google still wasn’t for sale, and that the price had jumped to $3 billion.

Semel replied, “You still have the same business you had two weeks ago, right? Which adds up to nothing.” From Semel’s perspective, Yahoo couldn’t and didn’t buy the company.


Since that encounter, Google has gone public and become the darling of the investment community. Its current market valuation as of today is $147 billion, and Yahoo’s market cap is a little over $38 billion.

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