Yahoo has managed a détente with billionaire backseat driver Carl Icahn. So the question now is this: Can Yahoo manage one with the rest of its shareholders? We’ll find out this afternoon, when the company reports second-quarter earnings.
Having so persuasively argued that Carl Icahn is a doddering Luddite with no articulated plan for Yahoo other than the company’s sale to Microsoft, Yahoo has taken the logical next step and appointed the activist shareholder to its board of directors.
Yahoo’s latest broadside against the “Microsoft-Icahn agenda” has struck a chord with a key investor: Legg Mason Capital Management. The firm on Friday threw its support behind Yahoo, saying it will vote its 4.4 percent stake in Yahoo (60.7 million shares) against the slate of dissident directors presented by investor-agitator Carl Icahn.
Oh, happy day! Another letter from Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock and CEO Jerry Yang! Yawn … With its Aug. 1 shareholder meeting fast approaching, the company’s leadership is doing all it can to rally support. Hence today’s paean to redundancy, which argues once again, and in mind-numbing detail, why the company believes stockholders should beware the “Icahn-Microsoft agenda.”
The already acrimonious discussions between activist investor Carl Icahn and Yahoo have finally devolved into a full-on pie fight. When Yahoo rejected Microsoft’s latest take-it-or-leave-it offer on Saturday, Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock characterized the proposal as “ludicrous.” Today, Icahn replied to Yahoo suggesting that “ludicrous” is perhaps a word best applied to the company’s own behavior
“Facts are ventriloquists dummies,” Aldous Huxley once wrote. “Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense.” Truer words, right? Certainly as far as they apply to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang who is back in the press again today making the facts surrounding Microsoft’s pursuit of Yahoo talk a whole lot of the latter.
If Microsoft is so intent on acquiring Yahoo, why doesn’t it go ahead and make another offer? That was the gist of Yahoo’s comment on Microsoft’s claim this morning that it’s interested in discussing an acquisition of some or all of Yahoo — but only if the company replaces its CEO and board of directors.
So that “record” that “casts doubt on whether Microsoft was ever committed to a whole company acquisition” of Yahoo? Entirely a product of Yahoo’s imagination, apparently. Because in a statement issued this morning, Microsoft said that it is open to discussing a “major transaction” with Yahoo–if the company sacks CEO Jerry Yang and replaces its board of directors at its annual meeting next month.
Look out Jerry Yang, Carl Icahn now has one fewer distraction as he prepares to propose his slate of dissident board nominees at Yahoo’s Aug. 1 shareholder meeting. At its own shareholder meeting Thursday, Biogen investors voted to support management’s preferred board candidates and to reject a slate of directors proposed by Icahn.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
Don't miss a post! Sign up for our Daily Email and get AllThingsD.com delivered each day.
Get columns, blogs and video from D and All Things Digital on your iPhone. Download now »
