You pay someone to take something you own if the asset is a liability costing more than it&#x27;s worth or if there is an agreed upon price, that&#x27;s basically a kind of short sale. I was about to declare bankruptcy because I couldn&#x27;t sell property that I couldn&#x27;t use and cost me at least $1300 &#x2F; mo and increasing with no expectation of the possibility of selling (and to protect my other personal assets). It would have cost me another $40k+ that I didn&#x27;t think I could recover back in 7 years for various reasons not to mention the sheer opportunity costs.<p>For another tech company example, HP&#x27;s physical assets on the books exceeded the market cap of the company a couple years ago. The meaning is that even if HP is able to make a profit that the business is so unattractive to hold a long position that investors want to dump their shares (in bulk) - someone will be left holding the stock and nobody wants to be sucked at the end unless you are private equity or something and want to flip the company basically. There&#x27;s also still potentially cooked books from when HP bought Autonomy, and that&#x27;s priced in as the bet by how bad it&#x27;s scope would be. As fate so happened, HP wound up selling a bunch of land it owned in Cupertino to Apple for its new campus indicating it has no plans to expand in that area it used to dominate the industry (most US employees are in low cost of living areas for HP now consistent with companies that are in survival mode moreso than innovation &#x2F; growth mode).