True, but the rise had nothing to do with Mayer or the core Yahoo. It was the Alibaba stock in particular that drove the share price. Which is why if you remove

True, but the rise had nothing to do with Mayer or the core Yahoo. It was the Alibaba stock in particular that drove the share price. Which is why if you removed the value of Yahoo's shareholdings, the core Yahoo (nominally, at least) had a negative value. > the market has been anticipating this acquisition Yes, it has, but Mayer fought against that until she had no choice. She lost that battle when activist investor Starboard Value -- which had been pushing for the break-up -- got its CEO named to Yahoo’s board of directors. See http://www.ibtimes.com/yahoo-yhoo-shareholders-meeting-2016-endgame-marissa-mayer-2388404 http://www.ibtimes.com/yahoo-yhoo-shareholders-meeting-2016-... Starboard has been pushing the break up for a couple of years. It wrote several interesting letters, like this from January 2015: http://fortune.com/2015/01/08/starboards-latest-letter-to-yahoo/ http://fortune.com/2015/01/08/starboards-latest-letter-to-ya... You'll see that Starboard had already been pushing the break up of Yahoo and the sale to AOL's parent. Further, we continue to believe that Yahoo must significantly reduce costs to improve profitability in its core business and should be considering a combination with AOL. A combination with AOL, structured properly, could accomplish all of these goals by allowing for: (i) a tax-efficient separation of the non-core minority equity investments; (ii) tremendous cost synergies of between $1 billion and $1.5 billion; and (iii) a strong growth platform given AOL’s progress in mobile and video advertising. The investors were scared because Mayer had, in effect, a bottomless supply of cash (in Yahoo Japan and Alibaba) and she had already wasted $2 billion. They wanted the break-up before she could splash out on something bigger and even more useless than Tumblr. That's one of the reasons why she was such a failure.