Former CEO of Yahoo Marissa Mayer revealed in an interview on Saturday that passing up the opportunity to invest in Netflix remains one of her major regrets during her time leading Yahoo.
Mayer explained that while the decision to acquire Netflix or rival streaming platform Hulu were investment opportunities for the company in 2013, she opted to rather purchase the social blogging platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion. Netflix and Hulu were valued at approximately $4 billion and $1.1 billion respectively, Mayer recalled.
“We looked at a transformative acquisition, and we bought Tumblr,” Mayer explained in the interview with Tech Brew. While a cheaper option at the time, the former Yahoo CEO came to regret the purchase, with Tumblr losing over $700 million of its value. Netflix, in contrast, grew to a value of $140 billion while Disney became the majority owner of Hulu in 2019.