Carl Icahn Takes on Yahoo's Board

narramissic and several others have written to point out that Carl Icahn has initiated a proxy battle with Yahoo's board of directors over their rejection of Microsoft's bid for the company in February. Icahn has purchased millions of Yahoo shares over the past week and assembled a group of nine other investors (including Mark Cuban) to persuade the board to resume talks with Microsoft. Yahoo remains unimpressed. Icahn's letter to Yahoo accuses: "It is unconscionable that you have not allowed your shareholders to choose to accept an offer that represented a 72% premium over Yahoo's closing price of $19.18 on the day before the initial Microsoft offer. I and many of your shareholders strongly believe that a combination between Yahoo and Microsoft would form a dynamic company and more importantly would be a force strong enough to compete with Google on the Internet."

Money slaves..

[Anonymous Coward]

"I and many of your shareholders strongly believe that a combination between Yahoo and Microsoft would form a dynamic company and more importantly would be a force strong enough to compete with Google on the Internet"

Right..like they do care about that..they only want to cash out...money slaves.

Re:In other news....

[Anonymous Coward]

You've just become rich by making millions of people more miserable!

That's the very backbone of capitalism friend. This isn't a touchy-feely world full of flowers and lollypops. When you are an investor it is your job to make money, period.

Icahn's a Pain in The Ass

[ewhac]

Not that I would spend a great deal of effort defending Ed Zander, former CEO of Motorola, but when I was at Moto last year, Icahn seemed indignant that Motorola was sitting on some $12E+09 in cash, and was busy prancing around and bulk-mailing shareholders to vote him a seat on the board of directors, so that he could give the cash to Moto shareholders as a huge dividend (or something).

Even before Apple's iPhone came out and smacked Moto's RAZR out of the park, it was clear that Moto needed to be doing R&D for the next-gen handsets. Oh, and you might want to keep some cash around in case of a rainy day. Icahn got handed his hat. And Moto did a bunch of weird acquisitions.

These days, it's raining pretty hard at Moto. I'm sure that pile of cash is helping them through the lean times.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying: Carl Icahn is a vocal, over-exposed pain in the ass. Whenever he talks, put your hand over your wallet, and pay very careful attention to what he's doing with his own.

Schwab

Re:It's not completely their fault

[u38cg]

The current approach to monopolies in the US is not to assess whether a monopoly is being created as such. The thinking is that many monopolies, as defined by market share, still behave in a competitive manner. For example, the XM/Sirius merger gave the combined company a 100% share of the satellite radio market. It was not blocked because the merged company will still have to behave competitively, or they will lose out to other audio entertainment alternatives.

Similarly, if the barriers to entry in a market are low (by corporate standards) then a monopoly is likely to behave competitively. Since all you need to challenge Google is a server farm and some CS whizzes, Google will behave competitively even if it has a full 100% market share (which it doesn't, by any means). So there is effectively zero chance of this merger being blocked. And yes, just to clarify, I know the OP was joking...

Re:I don't get it.

[rtb61]

The M$ buy of Yahoo had nothing to do with making M$ a better company, it was all about Ballmer's survivability after his windows and office blunders as well as his bombastic boats about beating google. This was a look at the other hand buy, a whole lot of flash and noise about buying Yahoo to obscure the failures.

Simply put, in a few months the M$=B$ PR machine would rewrite history, add Yahoo market share and revenue to MSN's lack of market share and revenue and then claim all those gains for MSN as a result of Ballmer's skill, rather than simply buying those numbers in at a loss.

Re:In other news....

[Anonymous Coward]

If you know anything about Icahn's history you know he could not give a rats nads about whether Yahoo and MS will succeed. What he does is find situations where management are acting against shareholder value and then he takes over and makes the company change to improve shareholders returns. Often these are short term . The idea being that investors get their money out of what has been a total dog and get out with a profit. Then they can go invest elsewhere.

Yahoo is a dog. An ugly one at that. The fact is the sale to MS allows investors to get out with some profit and put their money somewhere else.

Yahoo Chairman replies

[kernowyon]

The BBC has a reply to Mr Icahn from Roy Bostock today - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7404012.stm [bbc.co.uk]
in which Mr Bostock states that it is not in the shareholders interests to allow Icahn and his "handpicked nominees" to take over.
This is going to get very interesting!

Re:It's not completely their fault

[mgblst]

He is not comparing them, he is pointing out how silly the statement that he is responding to actually is. He is saying that just because you do one good thing, does not forgive all the crap you have done in the past.

How fucking out of touch do you have to be with the english language/logic to jump to such a stupid conclusion.

And Yahoo responds by saying

[slack_prad]

Icahn "misunderstands" [marketwatch.com] Microsoft proposal