Yahoo CEO gives birth to twin girls after big announcement

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced Thursday that she gave birth to identical twin girls earlier in the morning. She and her husband have a four-year-old son named Macallister.

When she announced she was pregnant with twins, Mayer indicated she would be taking “limited time away and working throughout”.

Yahoo was widely expected to spin off its $31 billion stake in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba into a new company, so it came as a bit of surprise Wednesday when it announced that it wouldn’t do so.

Also Read: CEO Marissa Mayer to get $150 million if Yahoo fires her?

That timeline could have lead to traders’ lacklustre response to Yahoo’s news.

At the end of the day Yahoo will still divide into two companies, one with the Alibaba stake and the other with its core Internet operations. “We can understand why a buyer looking to attach their existing assets to a large media property might look at Yahoo! only reluctantly vs. alternative strategies”.

As USA Today points out, the Alibaba stake is worth around $30 billion and it could have meant potentially major tax payments if Yahoo had gone with the original plan.

Shares of Yahoo rose 85 cents, or 2.4 percent, to $35.70 before the market open.

Last month, an activist investor Starboard Value LP advised Yahoo to halt its planning to do investment in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. The reason was quite appropriate as the company was already facing downfall and it had to consider the tax applied amid the process of participation.

Yahoo had previously said it would spin off the Alibaba stake into a separate company in a bid to separate that asset from its core Internet operations.

This year, Yahoo stock is off 33%. Peck says $6-$8 billion, which is 5X a projected EBITDA (a financial term that gives a view of the operating profit of a business). On the same call, Mayer said that separating the Alibaba investment from the rest of the company will provide more transparency into the value of the business.

It will be the latest overhaul of a company that is now on its fifth full-time CEO in the past decade, all of whom have struggled to define what Yahoo’s mission should be. “The board has complete confidence in the management team and the leadership of Yahoo and believes the company is making important strides toward its transformation”, he said. The foundation for all these reports hinged upon a hypothetical: If Yahoo sold itself to a new owner, it may want a new person at the helm, so maybe it will fire Mayer or she will resign.