Marissa Mayer
American business executive and engineer, former CEO of Yahoo!

Marissa Ann Mayer (; born May 30, 1975) is an American business executive, software engineer, and investor who served as president and chief executive officer of Yahoo! from 2012 to 2017, when it was sold to Verizon. She was a long-time executive, usability leader and key spokesperson for Google (employee No. 20), and was its first woman software engineer. Mayer later co-founded Sunshine and, after its assets were acquired in 2025, founded the artificial intelligence company Dazzle AI.
Early life
Mayer was born in Wausau, Wisconsin, the daughter of Margaret Mayer, an art teacher of Finnish descent, and Michael Mayer, an environmental engineer who worked for water companies. Her grandfather, Clem Mayer, had polio when he was seven and served as mayor of Jackson, Wisconsin, for 32 years. She has a younger brother. She would later describe herself as having been "painfully shy" as a child and teenager.
She "never had fewer than one after-school activity per day," participating in ballet, ice-skating, piano, swimming, debates, and the Brownies. During middle school and high school, she took piano and ballet lessons, the latter of which taught her "criticism and discipline, poise, and confidence".
“Marissa Mayer” enters the record as american business executive and engineer, former CEO of Yahoo. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Marissa, Mayer and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Marissa Mayer” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Marissa, Mayer and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q14086. VIAF identifies the subject as 308229746. The Library of Congress control number is n2014021950. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1975, 2012, 2017 and 2025.
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This entry incorporates text from “Marissa Mayer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.