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Steward of Capital Marissa Mayer Serves Up a Pile of Yahoo Dough to Wall Street in Q4 Earnings Call

A tasty handover of the stake in the Chinese Internet juggernaut

by Kara Swisher

Did Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer really have a choice?

No, but let’s all get excited for she and CFO Ken Goldman to pretend they did on spinning off the company’s entire stake in China’s Alibaba Group.

Here, for your reading pleasure, is my liveblog of Yahoo’s fourth-quarter earnings call with Wall Street analysts. While the results were less than impressive, the news of the creation of a new company to hold Yahoo’s 15 percent share of Alibaba was more than enough to placate investors.

Thus, Mayer treated her shareholders like royalty and avoided a revolt that would have resulted had she not. Instead of off-with-her-head, it was on with the payout.

Here’s the call:

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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