What happened between Apple’s January 5 disclosure of Steve Jobs’s “hormonal imbalance” and the company’s January 14 announcement that the CEO would be taking a six-month leave of absence? That’s the focus of an ongoing Securities and Exchange Commission probe into Steve Jobs’s health, an investigation that seems to, well, be going nowhere.
For a company whose business is built on the recession-brutalized fine-dining industry, OpenTable’s IPO last week was impressive. Must have made for quite a windfall for the company’s larger investors. Especially those who took the opportunity to dump their stakes in their entirety.
2009 has proven a lucrative year for departing Yahoo CFO Blake Jorgensen. Sure, he’s leaving Yahoo, but he’s doing so with a $1.8 million lump-sum severance payment, according to a company SEC filing. This in addition to the $250,000 bonus he was awarded earlier this year.
If you thought the decline in subscribers posted by Sirius XM Radio in its first quarter was ugly, you ain’t seen nothing yet. With the souring economy weighing heavy on the auto industry–a mainstay of Sirius’s business–and partner Chrysler navigating bankruptcy, the struggling company is bracing itself for continued subscriber losses in its second quarter.
A couple bombshells in Sun Microsystems’s latest 10-Q filing. Seems the company believes it may have violated the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bans bribery of foreign government officials. Oh, and some of its shareholders are suing to block its acquisition by Oracle.
Larry Ellison’s got some news for skeptics predicting Oracle will dump the Sun Microsystems hardware business when its $7.4 billion acquisition of the company closes: It’s not gonna happen. In an interview with Reuters subsequently filed with the SEC, the Oracle CEO said he plans to maintain that part of Sun’s business.
Business journalists who had their careers curtailed by the souring economy might consider stopping by the Securities and Exchange Commission on their next trip to the unemployment office. The agency may have a good use for their talents, according to Chairman Mary Schapiro, who finds the sadly diminished ranks of the business press worrisome.
Here’s further confirmation that Time Warner is looking to spin off AOL. In an SEC filing Monday, the company said it is seeking to amend debt agreements that restrict it from unloading the struggling business. Coming as it does after the hiring of Tim Armstrong, a former Google executive, as AOL CEO and chairman, the move would seem to suggest that Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes has given up on the idea of an AOL merger with Yahoo and is pushing ahead full-bore with a spinoff.
Intel CEO Paul Otellini has confirmed what “people familiar with the matter” and industry observers have been saying for months now. Sun is eager to find a buyer and has offered itself for sale to IBM and pretty much anyone else who might have the cash to acquire it.
Roger McNamee’s hyperbolic predictions about iPhone-to-Pre conversion rates didn’t go over too well at Palm. Appalled by McNamee’s inflated, indecorous claims about its forthcoming smartphone, the handset maker on Monday filed a Free Writing Prospectus with the SEC that distances the company from McNamee’s claims and categorically refutes his your-next-iPhone-will-be-a-Pre foolishness. em>That was CRAZY talk, Roger
Investors holding shares in foundering satellite radio outfit Sirius XM just received a bit of welcome news. The company has closed its investment deal with Liberty Media, resolving the “uncertainty” surrounding its debt maturing in 2009. Good thing too, because that uncertainty was pretty worrisome.
Two weeks after Canadian regulators dropped the hammer on Blackberry maker Research-In-Motion for its stock option backdating scheme, the Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped it again. Today, the agency charged four RIM execs with illegally granting stock options to company employees over an eight-year period from 1998 through 2006.
“Terrible.” That was Seagate CEO Bill Watkins’s (at right, doing his Dr. Octopus impression) one-word description of the disk drive maker’s December sales last week–and apparently one of his final public comments as Chief Executive as well. This morning Seagate said that Watkins is handing the CEO reins over to Chairman Stephen Luczo and that the two will confer over the next week to “determine what role, if any, Mr. Watkins will have at the company going forward.”
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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