with Yahoo owning the rest. Alibaba and Softbank wanted to buy out Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba as well as its stake in Yahoo! Japan. While Yahoo agreed to the Alibaba divestment (it had made no decision on the Yahoo! Japan issue), the bone of contention was in structuring the deal to mini- mize Yahoo’s tax bill on the capital gains. In late August 2012, Yahoo announced that it would sell half its Alibaba investment immediately for $7.6 billion (resulting in after-tax cash of $4.3 billion) and the rest when Alibaba was expected to go public in 2015.24 The key challenge to Mayer in this area was how to use the proceeds of the Alibaba investment. Early on, she had indicated that she would use the proceeds to make critical acquisitions, but pressure from shareholders had caused her to back off from this position.