Jerry Yang

Jerry Chih-Yuan Yang was born Yang Chih-Yuan on November 6, 1968, in Taipei, Taiwan. He is a Taiwanese-born American billionaire, computer programmer, internet entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. Yang co-founded Yahoo! Inc., served as its CEO, and is a founding partner of AME Cloud Ventures. His net worth was estimated at $3.1 billion as of May 2025.

Yang’s father died when he was two, and his mother, a professor of English and drama, moved the family to San Jose, California, in 1978. There, his grandmother and extended family helped care for him and his younger brother, Chih-Kong Ken Yang, while their mother taught English to other immigrants. Upon arriving in the U.S., Yang adopted the American name Jerry; his mother took the name Lily, and his brother became Ken. He recalled knowing only the English word “shoe” upon arrival but became fluent in about three years. He attended Ruskin Elementary, Sierramont Middle, and Piedmont Hills High School in San Jose, then earned both a Bachelor’s and Master’s in electrical engineering from Stanford University in four years. At Stanford in 1989, he met David Filo; the two went to Japan in 1992 for a six-month exchange program, where Yang met his future wife, Akiko Yamazaki.

Yang co-created Yahoo! in 1994. While at Stanford that year, he and Filo built “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” a directory of other websites. As it grew, they renamed it Yahoo! Inc. By fall 1994, it drew about 100,000 unique visitors. In April 1995, Sequoia Capital invested $2 million, Tim Koogle became CEO, and Yang and Filo were named “Chief Yahoo.” A second funding round came in fall 1995 from Reuters and Softbank. Yahoo! went public in April 1996 with 49 employees. In 1999, the MIT Technology Review TR100 named Yang one of the top 100 innovators under 35. After the dot-com bubble burst, Terry Semel replaced Koogle as CEO; Semel was fired in 2007 due to Google’s rise, and Yang became interim CEO. He served as CEO from 2007 to 2009, left Yahoo! in 2012, and later founded AME Cloud Ventures. As of 2015, he sat on several corporate boards. Venture capitalist Rob Solomon called Yang “a great founder, evangelist, strategist and mentor” who “created the blueprint for what is possible on the Internet.”

Yang met Alibaba founder Jack Ma in 1997 during his first trip to China. Ma, then a government-employed tour guide and former English teacher, showed Yang the Great Wall. They got along and discussed the Web’s growth; Ma launched Alibaba months later. A 1997 photo of them at the Great Wall hangs in Alibaba’s Hangzhou office. In 2005, before becoming CEO, Yang directed Yahoo! to buy a 40% stake in Alibaba for $1 billion plus Yahoo! China’s assets, valued at $700 million. In 2012, Yahoo! sold part of that stake for $7.6 billion, and it made an additional $9.4 billion from Alibaba’s 2014 IPO. Hedge fund founder Eric Jackson called it “the best investment an American company has ever made in China,” adding that “Jerry deserves enormous credit for that.”

In fall 2005, a month after the Alibaba deal, news emerged that Yahoo! had helped Chinese authorities arrest journalist Shi Tao in November 2004. Shi had used a Yahoo email to anonymously alert a pro-democracy U.S. website that Chinese media were ordered not to cover the fifteenth anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests. Yahoo! gave Chinese security the IP addresses of senders, recipients, and the message’s time. Shi was convicted of “divulging state secrets abroad.” Yang justified the action, saying, “To be doing business in China or anywhere else in the world, we have to comply with local law[s].” Reporters Without Borders called Yahoo! “a Chinese police informant.” In April 2007, journalist Wang Xiaoning and others sued Yahoo! for allegedly aiding the Chinese government, claiming it led to torture including beatings and imprisonment. In early November 2007, Yang faced a Congressional committee over Yahoo!’s role in the arrests. He apologized to Shi Tao’s mother, who attended the hearing. A week later, Yahoo! settled with the affected dissidents, paying undisclosed compensation. Yang said, “After meeting with the families, it was clear to me what we had to do to make this right for them, for Yahoo, and for the future.” That week, he established the Yahoo! Human Rights Fund to provide humanitarian and legal support to online dissidents. In February 2008, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she raised the jailed journalists’ cases with Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi, citing a letter from Jerry Yang requesting help. Late in 2008, the Laogai Museum, run by dissident Harry Wu and showcasing China’s laogai penal system, opened with funding from the Yahoo! Human Rights Fund.