Jerry Chih-Yuan Yang is a Taiwanese-American billionaire computer programmer, internet entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. He is the co-founder and former CEO of Yahoo! Inc. As of July 2021, Yang has a net worth of over $2 billion.
Jerry Yang is a Taiwanese-American internet entrepreneur, best known as the co-founder, and the former CEO of ‘Yahoo! Inc.’
Yang was born with the name Yang Chih-Yuan in Taipei, Taiwan, his mother was a professor of English and drama and his father died when he was two. In 1978, his mother moved the family to San Jose, California, where his grandmother and extended family took care of the boys while his mother taught English to other immigrants. After moving to the US Yang took the American name Jerry, his mother Lily, Born in Taiwan, his family moved to the United States when he was ten and he learned to speak the English language in the following years. Later, he completed his graduation as well as post-graduation in electrical engineering and applied for his doctoral degree. While studying for his PhD, he met David Filo, his office partner, and soon they both became hooked to the Internet which was newly introduced at the time. While surfing, they identified the complexity in locating the required websites over the internet and developed software to overcome this problem. Originally they created a website to provide for a way to organize the maze of internet addresses on the World Wide Web, which later transformed into a multi-billion corporation. Soon, the website’s immense popularity encouraged them to establish ‘Yahoo! Inc.’, which gradually became a successful provider of Internet and Web-based services. He served as the ‘Chief Yahoo’ of the company in 2007 for over a decade and played a key role in managing and developing the company’s business policies, also serving as head of several other corporations.
In 2017, he and his wife, Akiko Yamazaki, pledged $25 million to San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, the largest gift in the museum’s history.
In 2016, Yahoo completed the sale of its core operating business to Verizon for $5 billion in cash.
Yang founded AME Cloud Ventures, which bets on data-driven startups. Through his fund and personally, Yang has made several impact-minded investments.
Yang began a two-year term as chair of the board of trustees at Stanford, where he received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, in July 2021.
Yang met Alibaba founder Jack Ma in 1997 during Yang’s first trip to China. Ma, a government-employed tour guide and former English teacher, gave Yang a tour of the Great Wall of China. The two hit it off and discussed the growth of the Web. Ma created Alibaba several months later. A 1997 photo of Yang and Ma at the Great Wall still hangs on the wall in Alibaba’s Hangzhou office.

In 2005, under Yang’s direction but before he took over as CEO in 2007, Yahoo! purchased a 40% stake in Alibaba for $1 billion plus the assets of Yahoo! China, valued at $700 million. In 2012, Yahoo! sold a portion of its stake in Alibaba for $7.6 billion.[12] The company made an additional $9.4 billion in Alibaba’s 2014 IPO.[13] Eric Jackson, the founder of hedge fund Ironfire Capital, called Yahoo!’s investment in Alibaba “the best investment an American company has ever made in China,” and stated, “Jerry deserves enormous credit for that.”