IP. Yahoo!'s patents are valued between $4B and $8B, depending on who you ask.

That's probably completely wrong. The patent landscape has changed dramatically in the past 5 years. The likelihood they could extract significant sums of money from these patents drops every day.

I'd really love to read the summary of the patent landscape that explains that.

This might be a good starting place, "Software Patents: A One-Year Review of Alice v. CLS Bank" (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2619388)

Like I said, depends on who you ask. The point isn't the amount but that some people value it for the IP, not net income.

I mentioned this in another comment but how does Yahoo even know that its intellectual property wasn't taken?

Is it unreasonable to suspect that a company that has had multiples breaches of security of this extent might also not have had its IP taken out from underneath them as well?

when you patent something it's always in the public domain, that's the point of patents, except that the ownership isn't public domain just the knowledge of a particular tech. but yes, nothing guarantees that tech they had in the pipeline isn't being stolen right now.

but if the details of a patent have been stolen the patents still have value, except for when the exact implementation of a patent can be circumvented due to access to plans.

What if you ask Verizon?

If you ask Verizon, this leak was a great way to get a better price on a deal they already wanted to have happen.

with the way things are going, they just need to wait a few more months to get a even better deal.

They make plenty of money gross. Fire 80% of the staff and they'll be very profitable net as well.

You are assuming that other costs apart from salaries are negligible and that firing 80% of the staff will have negligible effect on revenue.

They are pretty big assumptions to make.

First assumption, other costs are negligible: no, I'm not. Every dollar spent on salary is a dollar that doesn't go to profit.

Second assumption: letting 80% of staff go won't hurt. For that, I simply have to describe what I've heard from friends / coworkers / scuttlebutt about working at yahoo. But there are a lot of eng doing maybe a couple hours of work per day.

from

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/YHOO/financials?p=YHOO

under opex it looks like there's plenty of fat to cut.

By that logic, businesses would never employ people because it's a cost that doesn't go to profit.

And the fat on that OPEX you linked is the writeoff from the Tumblr purchase.

For companies where employees add little/no value (yahoo!), then yes.