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You have to be careful quoting offer prices. Microsoft's 2008 offer for YHOO today would be ~$46.80/share.

It is best to look at market cap to determine value - Microsoft's 2008 offer was $44.6B; Yahoo's current market cap is $41.65B.

The discrepancy from then to now comes from the number of shares outstanding. There are fewer outstanding YHOO shares today than there were in 2008.

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Did you also adjust for inflation in there? If not, there's an additional ~10% that can be adjusted for. $44.6B in 2008 would be $49.84B in 2016 USD, an even wider gap.

But there are fewer shares because yahoo "returned" north of $10B to investors through share buybacks. Not exactly sure how that should be accounted for, but I think relevant to the calculation.

Indeed, for a long-term "buy & hold" investor, the share price is much more meaningful than market cap because of the buybacks.

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