Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

It's shocking to me that Yahoo is worth $48b today, they've been on an inevitable decline towards irrelevance since the mid 2000s.

She took over Yahoo on July 16th, 2012 when Yahoo's stock price was ~$16. It's now trading at ~$48. That's about a 3x.

Google over the same time period has done about a 2.8x.

Microsoft over the same time period has done about a 2x.

There are 100 HUGE reasons BESIDES Marissa that we can account for their shareholder success eg (1) they were trading at a lower PE than market competitors (2) they had a huge Alibaba share that was worth more than the entire Yahoo company when she took over (3) MSFT offered ~$45b in 2008 which means their ~$46b current enterprise value is a huge 9 year failure!

BUT I think that Marissa played the critical role of "responsible adult" that gave the market a reason to let Yahoo survive as an independent.

She had a huge brand name that she lent to Yahoo, and each of the 3 reasons I list above were to the board's detriment.

If anybody should get the fuck you it should be the Yahoo leadership of the mid-2000s, and the board's leadership since then.

The valuation is almost completely unrelated to "Yahoo" the core business. Yahoo the publicly traded company owns ~$40 billion worth of marketable securities (Alibaba and Yahoo Japan mainly).

Imagine if you owned a convenience store that had a vault with $40 billion in gold bars inside. Your business would be worth $40 billion, despite being a convenience store.

> Imagine if you owned a convenience store that had a vault with $40 billion in gold bars inside. Your business would be worth $40 billion, despite being a convenience store.

Not if you owed $12 billion in taxes on those gold bars.

It's a very special, magical vault that confers tax-free status as long as you never open it. There's one gold magnate buyer who has expressed interest in buying your store for nearly the full value of the gold because he never intends on opening the vault.

(I think the metaphor has been stretched to the limit...)

I'm shocked at how bad Yahoo is. I've mostly ignored them for years, but yesterday I had a reason to log in - a small manufacturer uses a yahoo group for support. I've had an account for a decade or so, but didn't know the password. The backup email account looked oddly like my real email with a "2" appended on the end of the user name.

Thinking there is no way this would work, I signed up for a new account with that email address and used it to recover the password for my old account! I must have made up an address when they pestered me about a backup email.

Here is what shocked me: 1) Forgot your password page hung several times. It sat there for minutes and I had refresh and go at it again. 2) New account - verify phone with a code. The page to submit the code would spin and time out after a few minutes. After a few failed attempts they wouldn't let me try anymore - but they still let me log in. Did I really verify my phone or skip it? I don't know or care. 3) I found the group I needed to use. I couldn't find a button to post or join the group. I googled. I had to log in on my phone to get a Join button - there isn't on on a PC.

Yahoo is falling apart. I knew nobody cared about yahoo, but I didn't know until yesterday that the people at yahoo don't care about yahoo.

What is it with their login process? I tried to login to my Flickr account on Sunday, but I couldn't figure out how to do it. It's been weird for years but now they've broken it completely.

And the best bit: anybody else could have recovered your account too!

They're not worth $48 Billion today - they just sold for $4.8 Billion. You miscalculated by $43.2 Billion dollars.

Most of the value of the stock was based on their shares of Alibaba. The Yahoo component was largely worthless but the indirect shares of Alibaba are/were valuable.

At one point the stock was actually trading less than what alibaba + Yahoo japan was worth. Effectively the Yahoo business was worth pretty much 0 dollars at least to the market. It seems unfair when you make so much money for pretty much not doing anything for the core business.

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