Wall Street was valuing the web businesses as worthless so this should be interesting (Yahoo's total market cap was about equal to its remaining stake in Alibaba). Shares are up 5% after hours on the news.
Actually many times Yahoo had negative valuation (ie: Yahoo market cap was lower than Yahoo shares in Alibaba, thus if you discounted Alibaba value, Yahoo had negative value).
They have a lot of employees to feed with a dying web property.
There are still big tax issues with the Alibaba stake so that definitely has something to do with it. If they can get it to be a tax free spin off the value should increase quite a bit.
Or just as not worth more than the trouble they're bringing to this whole ordeal, when viewing it all as a portfolio of assets. (referring to the core biz)