Alibaba goes public this morning. Forty minutes after the market opened it still was unclear when the first trade of BABA would occur — it could still be an hour more, according to designated market maker Pat Barclay of Barclays, just interviewed on CNBC outside Post 8 at the New York Stock Exchange.

Alibaba goes public this morning. Forty minutes after the market opened it still was unclear when the first trade of BABA would occur — it could still be an hour more, according to designated market maker Pat Barclay of Barclays, just interviewed on CNBC outside Post 8 at the New York Stock Exchange. But the first mandatory indication was a whopping $80-$83 in the 30-million-share range, he said. Where BABA opens is still up on the air, but even at the striking price of $68 Alibaba would be worth a staggering $168 billion. Alibaba’s largest stockholder, Japanese investment giant SoftBank, was not expected to be among the first sellers. But Yahoo has said it would be, and this is good-news-bad-news for the company, as Douglas MacMillan writes in the Wall Street Journal:

The windfall, long awaited by Yahoo investors, puts pressure on Chief Executive Marissa Mayer to find new areas of growth. More than two years into her attempt to turn around the aging Internet portal, its core advertising business is shrinking and Yahoo continues to cede share of the market to Google.

Yahoo will return at least half of the Alibaba proceeds to shareholders, finance chief Ken Goldman said in July. He didn't specify whether that would take the form of a buyback or dividend.

Among the beneficiaries will be some newly-minted millionaires, Andrew Jacobs and Neil Gough write from Hangzhou, China for the New York Times:

Started here in 1999, Alibaba has followed the model of Microsoft, Google and other American technology companies, generously handing out stock to all levels of workers, from senior executives to receptionists. It has created a wealth diaspora rarely seen in China, where the economy is still dominated by state-owned enterprises, and private companies generally reserve riches for executives at the upper echelons.

The initial public offering ... will provide Silicon Valley-style payouts. At Alibaba and its affiliates, around 6,000 current and former employees owned stock worth nearly $8 billion before the I.P.O. And that sum represents only a piece of the shares doled out over the years to employees, some of whom cashed out earlier at lower, albeit still lucrative, prices.

So where does Alibaba founder Jack Ma get his inspiration? Ma reminded investors during a morning appearance CNBC's Squawk Box this morning: Forrest Gump. As he has said of the fictional poster boy for overachievers: "Forrest Gump is not a smart guy, but he is focused. He's not talented, but he is very, very hard working, and he's very simple and opportunistic."

And Ma's aspirations? "We want to be bigger than Wal-Mart ... We want people to say this is a company ... that changed the world."

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THE ORACLE OF ORACLE: Larry Ellison, one of the most colorful, successful and opinionated titans of tech, is stepping aside at Oracle, the company he co-founded in 1977 and turned into a behemoth with nearly $38 billion in revenues last year in the decidedly unsexy but critical arena of enterprise software. Ellison will become executive chairman and CTO, and has named Mark Hurd and Safra Catz as co-CEOs. As Josh Bersin in writes on LinkedIn, this is a succession done right:

[I]t shows that Oracle is now mature enough and smart enough to build a long term succession plan for Ellison himself … This puts Larry where he fits best: watching the product strategy, observing market trends, and pushing Oracle to aggressively move when the time is right.

Ellison may thrive on his reputation as a flamboyant entrepreneur who made it very, very big, but he is hardly all hat and no cattle. Steve Jobs and Ellison were friends for a quarter century and when Ellison hired Hurd - who had been hounded out of Hewlett Packard - Ellison invoked an allusion to Jobs' ouster by Apple to express his incredulity that so valuable an executive could be disposed of. Now the question is, does the co-CEO thing work? On paper, it would seem to be asking for trouble. It seems to work well enough over at Chipotle.

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SCOT UNFREE: Scots have voted to remain part of the United Kingdom in a rare public referendum that maintains a 307-year-old affiliation that began by choice and remains voluntary. Turnout was extraordinary: Some 3.5 million voters of an eligible pool of four million, and, despite a plethora of too-close-to-call polls, the final tally was decisive: 55%-45%. Leader of the independence movement Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond was gracious in defeat but pointed out that 1.6 million Scots had voted to secede. "I don't think of any of us … would have thought such a thing could be credible or possible," he said. This is now a stubborn fact London will have to factor in when it comes to internal relations with the rest of the Commonwealth. Prime Minister David Cameron, who may have bet his political future on the decision to allow the vote to proceed, acknowledged as such:

It is absolutely right that a new and fair settlement for Scotland should be accompanied by a new and fair settlement that applies to all parts of our United Kingdom. In Wales, there are proposals to give the Welsh government and Assembly more powers. And I want Wales to be at the heart of the debate on how to make our United Kingdom work for all our nations. In Northern Ireland, we must work to ensure that the devolved institutions function effectively.

What's changes? The Sterling strengthened on the news, and inside baseball analysts say this bolsters "Brexit" — a UK exit from the European Union. And, of course, as Alistair Heath of the Telegraph says: Everything.

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