Yes which sounds stupid until you realize they didn't own "Alibaba stock itself," Yahoo did. Yahoo could've used that money as it wished but activist investors held Mayer's job as ransom, and she just payed in full.
Yahoo's purchase of Tumblr for nearly a billion dollars is a great example. That asset will likely never give Yahoo a return.
Genuinely curious.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast.com
Made Mark Cuban some money but it never turned a profit for Yahoo and they don't have anything in that space anymore.
You can look at the entire list here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition...!
A couple of others that stand out: GeoCities, Zimbra (Yahoo bought it for $350 Mil, sold it to VMware for less who sold it down the road as well), etc.
Which was kind of like "PayPal buying eBay" in terms of Yahoo!'s core business, but didn't go far enough.
That's an expensive domain name but the redirect works :P
The value of any business entity with non-zero liabilities is less than the sum of its assets. That's just finance 101.
These assets and liabilities exist all the time, though. In the case of a publicly traded company where the market cap is substantially less than the book value -- concrete assets less concrete liabilities -- there is a judgement that these fuzzy assets and liabilities aggregate to a net liability. That's a sign of perceived distress, but not really rare.
Its even less rare for a company to be valued less than its (concrete) assets -- this is fairly normal. That just means that the net positive goodwill is less than concrete liabilities.
if you did that, you can just go to any stock market and buy any stock. any. without ever even knowing which company they are for. it is the same reasoning. If you think yahoo has 50b in cash because it has stock of other companies valued at 50b, you can just buy 50b of any company and you will have 50b? probably you are going to have 50b-+(market fluctuation) which is what nobody wants to bet on so easily.
only you and icann reason like that :)