Yahoo owns a roughly 39% stake in Alibaba which is by far the most valuable asset on Yahoo's books. Alibaba has been wanting to repurchase this stake for a while now. With Yahoo so cheap, buying the whole company might be the easiest way to buy back the stock. The rest of Yahoo is just icing on the Alibaba cake (if not an outright liability).<p>How times change.
China of course has a few trillion in US Treasury bills burning a hole in its pocket (they dont belong to Alibaba but they presumably have RMB to change for them). The only sane solution for China is to start buying real assets in the US. One official recently suggested they buy Intel, Apple and Boeing. But hey why not Yahoo too. There will be a lot of these purchases coming up.
It's all starting to make sense now.<p>Carol Bartz and Jack Ma did not get along at all. She chewed him out in front of his underlings in Sunnyvale when they first met; and he never forgave her for that. Getting insulted in front of your underlings is a huge deal in many cultures.<p>If Bartz was still the CEO, she would have torpedoed any possible deal like this. So she had to go. The Board fired her to pave the way for Ma to put together a deal.<p>Ma says he'll be spending the next year in the US, "studying the market". Why the heck would he be wasting time here, when he already has a huge company to run in China, if he didn't intend on making a massive acquisition?<p>The next few months should be "interesting", if you're a Yahoo.
"The whole piece of Yahoo,"<p>Hah buddy, as long as you're a citizen of communist china you're not going to get "Yahoo Mail" nor "Yahoo Instant Messenger"... keep dreaming.