A closer look
Larry Page and Sergey Brin explicitly offered to sell their nascent search engine algorithm to Yahoo for a shockingly low one million dollars in 1998, but Yahoo executives firmly rejected the deal because they wanted users to spend more time browsing their own cluttered directory pages. Google's algorithm was simply too fast and efficient at sending users away to other sites, which directly contradicted Yahoo's entire business model of trapping people in a miserable vortex of banner ads and mediocre news links. In a desperate attempt to save their dying empire years later, Yahoo tried to buy Google again for three billion dollars, which Google naturally rejected before completely obliterating them from the cultural zeitgeist. This phenomenal display of corporate hubris serves as a daily reminder that the executives in charge of tech companies frequently have absolutely no idea what they are doing, entirely missing out on building a trillion-dollar empire due to pure arrogance
