Verizon

Verizon was born when Bell Atlantic merged with GTE. Its mobile arm, Verizon Wireless, was 45 percent owned by Vodafone until Verizon bought the British out in 2014 for $130 billion. In 2006 it acquired MCI, and with it the UUNET backbone. Verizon was early with LTE in 2010 and with 5G mmWave in 2019.

Its detour into media is less memorable. Verizon bought AOL in 2015 and Yahoo in 2017, merged them into something called Oath, and sold the lot to private-equity firm Apollo in 2021 for roughly half what it had paid.