In HBO’s ‘Silicon Valley’, Alibaba takes over Yahoo

HBO’s Silicon Valley has been more dramatic than comedic in season two, but it’s still been damn good. Amidst all that drama, it seems that hardly anybody has noticed a very small and amusing detail in the show’s revamped opening sequence – Alibaba has taken over Yahoo.

The refreshed Silicon Valley season two intro animation shows the Yahoo sign getting shrunk down as a massive “Alibaba Group” logo, written in Chinese and English, takes over the front of the Yahoo building. Check out the GIF:

Yahoo retains a 15 percent stake in the Chinese ecommerce titan after earning a near-US$10 billion jackpot from a partial sell-off during Alibaba’s IPO last year. Alibaba (which runs China’s top two ecommerce marketplaces) has a market cap today of US$205.31 billion, while Yahoo (which… er… ummm…) is pegged at US$39.85 billion.

See: Alibaba grows to 334 million active shoppers

Hat-tip to Beijing-based techie @bfishadow who spotted this little Silicon Valley quip this morning and posted a side-by-side comparison of the season one and two opening sequences.

可能是我想太多，然后稍微研究了一下。我发现 HBO 原创剧集 Silicon Valley 第一季和第二季的片头动画有点不太一样哟。 pic.twitter.com/48hNGLfTGi

— Julien G. (@bfishadow) May 1, 2015