Alibaba forced Yahoo to sell a sizable part of their position against their will, under threat of what might happen otherwise.
Then Alibaba, specifically Jack Ma, stole roughly $30 billion from Yahoo and Softbank by removing Ant Financial (and directly transferring ownership to himself [1]) from Alibaba without proper compensation to Yahoo and Softbank. You can't do anything about that sort of extraordinary theft in China, so that was that. And now about half or more of Ma's wealth is made up of what he stole from Yahoo and Softbank shareholders in that maneuver (out of his $40 billion, roughly $20-$21 is Alibaba, the rest is Ant Financial).
[1] per Bloomberg: "Ma controls Ant Financial through two China-based holding companies, Jun Han and Jun Ao, which own 42 percent and 34 percent of Ant Financial respectively, according to Alibaba's 2015 annual report."
I forgot about that. From what I just re-scanned, you aptly phrase it as "under threat of what might happen" if Bartz (former YHOO CEO) had fought it out.
From my crude timeline (below), I'm assuming that YHOO was more concerned about Alibaba (PrivateCo + Chinese jurisdiction) embezzling the rest of the assets, not that Alipay was extremely valuable and en route to becoming the most valuable private company in the world -- which it did!
2014: Alibaba goes public with IPO...
2011: Alibaba spun off Alipay and settles with Yahoo for 37.5% of Alipay (with $2-6B contingency clause should Alipay undergo a liquidity event.) This is after Jack Ma got tapped on the shoulder by the Chinese government and told he needs to comply with new regulations for third-party payment services. Or at least, that's Ma's story.
2001: Yahoo purchased 43% ownership of Alibaba in exchange for Yahoo China and $1B
Alibaba forced Yahoo to sell a sizable part of their position against their will, under threat of what might happen otherwise.
Then Alibaba, specifically Jack Ma, stole roughly $30 billion from Yahoo and Softbank by removing Ant Financial (and directly transferring ownership to himself [1]) from Alibaba without proper compensation to Yahoo and Softbank. You can't do anything about that sort of extraordinary theft in China, so that was that. And now about half or more of Ma's wealth is made up of what he stole from Yahoo and Softbank shareholders in that maneuver (out of his $40 billion, roughly $20-$21 is Alibaba, the rest is Ant Financial).
[1] per Bloomberg: "Ma controls Ant Financial through two China-based holding companies, Jun Han and Jun Ao, which own 42 percent and 34 percent of Ant Financial respectively, according to Alibaba's 2015 annual report."