With $25 billion in its coffers, Microsoft isn’t exactly hurting for cash. So why is the company planning a bond offering that could raise billions in additional capital? Microsoft will say only that the sale of the notes will be used for “general corporate purposes.” Those include working capital and share buybacks. They also include acquisitions.
The best thing that can be said of the week ending Oct. 10, 2008, is this: It’s over.
Marked by panic selling and wet-your-pants fear, it was one of the worst weeks in the financial world’s history–a week that cut the legs out from under Google, beat Yahoo until its market cap bled purple and caused the Dow Jones Industrial Average to swing more than one thousand points on an intra-day basis.
No surprise here. Yahoo shareholder dissatisfaction is following a trend line inverse to the company’s plummeting share price. In fact, the price has dipped so low that Ironfire Capital founder Eric Jackson–the dissident Yahoo investor who agitated for change at the company and the creator of the Yahoo! Plan B investor community–has dumped his Yahoo shares.
Carl Icahn has finally broken his silence. The outspoken billionaire investor who’s been oddly quiet since Yahoo announced its advertising partnership with Google, finally commented on the deal this morning saying it “might have some merit.”
July 3 will be “Independence Day” for Yahoo shareholders. So says Eric Jackson, president of Ironfire Capital, who is doing his damnedest to recruit an alternate slate of directors to present at Yahoo’s annual meeting on that day.
“It’s hard to believe the board could let this happen,” Jackson told the Associated Press.
Well, what do you know: Yahoo’s annual shareholder meeting didn’t conclude with CEO Terry Semel’s head piked on the exclamation point of the Yahoo sign outside company headquarters. Nor did it end with the blackballing of the directors responsible for Semel’s grotesquely large pay package.
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 …”
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