Alibaba Buys 18 Percent Stake in Weibo for $586 Million

Alibaba/Taobao are already huge. If they manage to make the account integration with Weibo work OK and can drive users across Weibo and Taobao...

Just imagine combining Amazon and Twitter.

Another story on the amount of cash Alibaba is moving: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5624887

It is interesting to think how social e-commerce will be like in the future. Sina Weibo and Alibaba(Taobao and Alipay) have so many individual informations.

My first reaction was that Weibo were going cheap - Twitter was valued at 11bn, while multiplying up Weibo sits at 2.5bn.

However, it makes sense in that Twitter sees 4 times more posts a day, and has less rivals. But then Weibo fills the place of both Twitter and Facebook, so maybe still cheap...

This is a big deal. Two of China's (and the world's) largest Internet companies linking up.

(investment/ownership = 15% now, up to 30% later).