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What a mess that spin-off showed eBay to be, too - At IPO, Paypal's market cap was nearly 150% of eBay's - Meaning that investors valued all of eBay as a 15+ Billion liability on Paypal itself. Given their complete lack of movement since, that's not a surprise.

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eBay is worth $37 billion today. They very clearly were not being valued at a negative market cap.

There are no examples in recent US stock market history of a large, extremely profitable corporation with a positive balance sheet being valued at a negative market cap. There's a reason for that.

The combined unit was suffering a discount. That's precisely why PayPal was separated. If your premise were right, eBay today would be worthless, not trading for $37 billion.

> eBay is worth $37 billion today

> extremely profitable corporation

Yup, layoffs look like a classic pump and dump to fiddle with the numbers for a sale.

300 positions is not going to significantly alter ebay’s profitability. It seems more likely to me that this is an occasion to drop a group of low performers all at once, or to make a certain job family redundant.

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