Thread by @doctorow

Yahoo is the poster-child for how financialization destroyed the wild and wooly internet - after receiving crazy sums of money from Softbank and the capital markets, it bought and destroyed most of the promising startups of the next decade.

1/

Today, the company is a husk - most of its assets sold to @Verizon, who made a new division called "Oath" to manage them (the name was chosen because Verizon's mismanagement made so many users want to swear).

2/

Verizon had to write down billions on that "investment" and sell off companies like Tumblr and Flickr for an infinitesimal fraction of what they paid for them (and this price was, in turn, an infinitesimal fraction of what Yahoo spent).

3/

The dregs of Yahoo post-Verizon-deal were reorganized as a finance zombie called Altaba, which was, miraculously worth $13b, from "cash holdings, partnership investments and bond portfolio, as well as certain patents that Verizon did not purchase."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaba

4/

Could you ask for any better proof that the system is designed to reward useless financial engineering at the expense of actual things that actual people actually like and use than Altaba being worth $13b?

Turns out, you could!

5/

Incredibly, Altaba isn't just a $13b zombie - it's a $13b zombie DEADBEAT, and it's being sued for $1b by the IRS, which is seeking to recover the taxes the company evaded.

theregister.com/2020/06/17/yah…

6/

It's even worse. The company REALLY owes $12.9b of its $13b in taxes, but it was able to whittle the IRS down to a mere $2.88b, a sum that Altaba counteroffered with $1.5b, going back and forth until the number dropped to $1b.

Which Altaba didn't pay.

7/

Image:
Scott Schiller (modified)
flickr.com/photos/schill/…

CC BY
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.…