What a horribly anticlimactic anticlimax. Billionaire backseat driver Carl Icahn has decided not to attend the Yahoo shareholders meeting Friday. This after months of agitating for the company’s sale to Microsoft and ouster of its board of directors. “I will not be attending [the annual Yahoo meeting],” Icahn wrote in a post to The Icahn Report.
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.”
Shareholders suing Yahoo’s board of directors for its alleged mishandling of the Microsoft buyout offer may find their efforts to pull the company’s controversial severance plan something of a fool’s errand. Because according to a new company filing, their chances of forcing Yahoo to scrap the plan are about as good as their chances of forcing CEO Jerry Yang to use capital letters in his all-hands memos just like a big boy.
Looks like billionaire investor Carl Icahn will only need 9 of the 10 dissident directors he’d hoped to appoint to Yahoo’s board. Longtime Yahoo director, Edward Kozel resigned today, reducing the company’s board from 10 members to 9.
Can a search advertising alliance between Yahoo and Google possibly pass regulatory muster? We may soon find out. Now that investor-tormentor Carl Icahn has filed a proxy slate to unseat Yahoo’s board with the intent, one way or another, to push the company back into merger negotiations with Microsoft, an obviously panicked Yahoo is scrambling to pull together a search-ad deal with Google.
If, as Carl Icahn claimed this morning, Yahoo’s board has acted irrationally and lost the faith of shareholders, the Internet company apparently sees no point in acting rationally to regain it. In a letter to the investor-agitator, Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock dismissed Icahn’s threat of a proxy battle nearly as brusquely as it turned away Microsoft.
“The Stars’ Address is CBS.” And now it’s CNET Networks’ as well. CBS this morning said it agreed to buy the Internet news and entertainment company for $1.8-billion in cash. The deal values CNET at about $11.50 per share–a 44.6% premium to yesterday’s closing price of $7.95. That’s $.50 more than the $11 Jana Partners, the investment management firm plotting a proxy fight for control of the company’s board, had hoped to squeeze out of CNET, so presumably even dissident investors are glad to see CBS stepping in here.
Looks like Yahoo’s boardroom blitz is on. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn has decided to move forward with a proxy fight to oust Yahoo’s entire board in favor of one more amenable to merger negotiations with Microsoft. “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,” Icahn wrote in a letter to Yahoo’s leadership.
Carl Icahn and Yahoo. Could it be any more perfect? Icahn specializes in shaking up companies suffering from critical failures in oversight and leadership. Yahoo is the very definition of that.
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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