Regardless of anything else about the brands, that sentence is certainly wrong. It pretty much just reads "this was written by a reporter without a financial ba

Regardless of anything else about the brands, that sentence is certainly wrong. It pretty much just reads "this was written by a reporter without a financial background". The one thing that definitely isn't worthless here is "the assets of the communications giants Yahoo and AOL". Those are worth $5B, as noted further down in the article. Verizon has written down almost all of the goodwill value of Oath - which despite the name is not brand equity or consumer loyalty, but the collected sum of a company's non-asset value. The discussion above is about whether it's fair to describe a division as 'worthless' when its assets are still quite valuable and its operations were not so much valueless as grossly overestimated. A lede which introduces the topic while horribly misusing the term 'assets' doesn't have much bearing on that.