One thing that Yahoo highlights is the importance of why you need to take care of your share price.<p>I&#x27;ve seen a few people here ask why a company would care about their share price after they&#x27;ve gone public. It affects your company both internally and externally.<p>Having a rising share price means you can play a different game than the rest of your competitors.<p>Internaly it helps hire and retain good employees.  Ask anyone who started at Microsoft in 1990 and worked their for a decade, or Google from 2004 until 2014.  I&#x27;d bet most of them would have gladly given up their salary for more option grants.<p>Externally it means Facebook can pay 15 Billion for WhatsApp.  I&#x27;m sure Yahoo was very interested in WhatsApp, but<p><pre><code>  1) couldn&#x27;t justify paying 15 Billion almost 1&#x2F;2 of their value for the app

  2) Who in their right mind would take Yahoo stock over FB stock?
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Sadly everything is going wrong for Yahoo,<p><pre><code>  - Alibaba&#x27;s shares have dropped since they went public

  - it now looks like they are going to have to pay around 20% of their Alibaba holdings in tax ( about 7 Billion).
  - Anyone who is going to buy some of their assets is going to have to pick up some money loosing businesses to get a deal done, which will make negotiations much tougher and probably mean the teams that get picked up are going to be cut down
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My new favorite theory that is floating around is that Alibaba actually acquires Yahoo&#x27;s Alibaba stake and Yahoo&#x27;s front page.  Microsoft still acquires the search assets and mail.  Google acquires Flickr and the fantasy sports and finance are spun out into a new company.&#x2F;