No, that's not at all what happened.

MS offered $44B for Yahoo inclusive of their almost 50% stake in then pre-ipo Alibaba. At the time, Yahoo's investment in Alibaba was valued at more than their entire market cap (negative valuation for Yahoo's domestic operations, or negative value taking into account tax implications of divestiture of these assets, etc).

Yahoo turned down MSFT's offer. Yahoo then spun off its entire company, keeping the name Yahoo with this spin-off subsidiary. The parent company, now named Altiba, retained ownership of the stake in Alibaba. This is where the ~50B valuation remained.

The spin-off company (valued in the negative by the market) was then sold for $4.5B to Verizon. Altiba retained its $56B market cap during this time.

Yahoo, inclusive of Altiba, out-performed MS's offer. It was a far better deal for shareholders to turn down MSFT. The net value to shareholders exceeded $60B.

There were a lot of poorly written articles at the time, which confused the sale of the subsidiary (YHOO) with the previous offer (for both YHOO and what became AABA) so your confusion is understandable. But this perspective is simply wrong.

You are thinking of the wrong era. We're talking about the 2008 offer to buy Yahoo. Alibaba was worth around $10b when Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for $45b.

https://www.forbes.com/2007/10/23/alibaba-ipo-pricing-market...

https://news.microsoft.com/2008/02/01/microsoft-proposes-acq...

Alibaba was pre-ipo at the time and did not have a market valuation. The most effective way to estimate a market value for Alibaba at this time is the 2008 MSFT offer itself.

MSFT didn't offer $44B for Yahoo's internet business. The offer was in large part for the Alibaba stake.

Regardless, MSFT priced it all at around $44B, which is less than it eventually was valued at.

There were still private transactions that valued Alibaba far lower that you claim. What justification do you have for your claim?

What was the valuation of the private transactions and when were they?

I amend my statement a little: They actually IPOed on the Hong Kong stock exchange in late 2007 before delisting in 2012. They IPOed at $10bn. They traded as high as $25bn the first day. But I have no other data.

https://www.reuters.com/article/tech-alibabacom-ipo-dc/aliba...

Alibaba was delaying going public because they wanted to get back the 40% they had sold to Yahoo. Their expected market cap was $200B, so the 40% that Yahoo owned would eventually be worth $80B. Hence MSFT offered $44B, which was a lowball offer.

Eventually Marissa made amends with Jack Ma and Yahoo was allowed to keep 24% of their stake, and then BABA went public. But before Marissa came on board, there was Carol Bartz who was a total fuck up of the highest order; a potty-mouthed prick if there was one. She pissed Jack off when they first met, and Jack took Alipay from out of under her. I'm surprised more people don't blame Bartz for the screwups at Yahoo.

I think you mean Altaba.

Probably. I can never remember the spelling.

That fate seems unlikely for Twitter, it's right now the go-to place for last-minute info on Putins invasion of Ukraine.

After that who knows. Well, apparently Elon Musk knows.

Telegram is turning out to be really good at this. Tons of Telegram channels churning out realtime info.

Discovery is difficult on telegram

reddit is pretty good at up to the minute information as well, it also benefits from topic filters/groupings and moderation.

Reddit is infected with the same problem as Twitter and YouTube though. It use to be a place with free communities and free speech.

But now, if you dare to post anything that doesn't align with what the MSM agenda for the day is. Your comment, post or even your whole sub-reddit gets banned.

> if you dare to post anything that doesn't align with what the MSM agenda ...

i think that this notion has lost its teeth as the MSM has been converted into some boogeyman and/or strawman. MSM certainly caters to an audience, and people are drawn to likeminded people, sometimes deluding themselves into believing that participating in a near-homogenous echo chamber would be an ideal expression of peaceful living. once there, though, they realize that it's still not quite perfect. foxnews not "right" enough for me so let's create newsmax or oan. biden's not "left" enough and so we should have nominated warren or sanders. people are going to disagree and that's fundamentally a good thing. how we disagree is where things seem to have degenerated.

the whole "MSM agenda" seems like an incorrect and lazy narrative. they have agendas and they cater to the people who demand those agendas. i doubt, though, that newsmax employs people to troll my tweets disagreeing with desantis' signing of the florida abortion bill today, reporting them in an attempt to get me banned. the people trying to get me banned are the audience and they believe they're doing the correct thing to advance their cause by attempting to squelch me.

MSM pours fuel on the fire, but they don't start it. same for reddit - it's going to be the collective of people and their ability to tolerate differentiated thinking. they're not brainwashed zombies, they're collectives of similarly-minded people who give in to their predisposed biases as exploited by MSM/social media for profit.

>they don't start it.

Yeah, a powerful apparatus that is MSM, would never be used to influence opinions and install beliefs.

> they're not brainwashed zombies, they're collectives of similarly-minded people who give in to their predisposed biases as exploited by MSM/social media for profit.

you ever heard of the 50 cent army? do you think only China has that, doesn't exist in the US?

i'm not saying it doesnt exist, just that it's not as prevalent as people want it to be. i'd argue that even then, most of the time it's an exploitation of biases and not a new installation of foreign beliefs.

>not a new installation of foreign beliefs.

if advertising works - installation of new beliefs is a huge successful industry.

Do you think advertising works?

> But now, if you dare to post anything that doesn't align with what the MSM agenda for the day is. Your comment, post or even your whole sub-reddit gets banned.

Where on earth does this opinion come from? All sorts of vile stuff gets posted to both Reddit and Twitter, and they rarely-if-ever take any action against it. Certain subreddits will still moderate, but community moderators (users of some sort) generally control the moderation of those places, not Reddit or their staff directly.

And in cases where Twitter/Reddit directly take action, it certainly isn't based on an "MSM agenda", it mostly seems to only happen to limit their legal or financial liability.

a lot of subreddits are basically marketing departments of some corporates.

those have paid employee mods where only posts and comments favourable to corporate goals are allowed. not quite the MSM, but I'd guess corporates would want to remain within the prevailing politically correct Overton window.

WTF? I see a constant never ending stream of shit on reddit that goes against the "MSM agenda". And those are the types of places are very quick to ban posters.

This has literally never been true. Reddit was designed from the ground up to rotate heliocentrically around the whims of moderators.

yahoo was the goto place for new email accounts. It was the goto place for instant messaging too. It was also in top # for search and other features. And it still is...