Add billionaire and activist shareholder Carl Icahn to the list of investors who want to pressure Yahoo to go back to the negotiating table with Microsoft. According to CNBC, he is considering a proxy fight and may be buying up as many as 50 million shares. (That would be about 3.6 percent of the total). He would find good company in Yahoo’s two biggest outside institutional shareholders, Gordon Crawford at Capital Research and Bill Miller at Legg Mason. Those latter two each own a little more than 6 percent each of Yahoo at last count. Add the three together, and that’s 15 percent of a proxy vote right there.
But if they want to nominate a new board of directors, they had better hurry because there are only two days left to file an alternate slate. Once Icahn gets involved with a company, though, he finds all sorts of ways to exert helpful pressure on the companies he wants to change. (Not that it always works—his efforts to change things at Time Warner went pretty much nowhere).
(Photo by Sam Lustgarten).
Looks like the stock price will go up, then everybody at Yahoo will get the axe.
Now thats what I would have done too.
Balmer made a strategic move by dropping MSFT’s bid, he knew ppl inside YHOO want to get acquired.
At first to entice the animal you get close to it (abt 50%) then the rest 50% it walks itself to you.
Good thinking, quick profit…
852
I’m thinking, why didn’t MS go hostile on Yahoo after the initial drop in stock value… Wouldn’t it make sense?
pwned by valleywag
Yahoo si toast!
Don’t forget about WCI! That was a real winner!
I hope Icahn gets involved. He usually does when entrenched management does self-serving things.
Could get interesting.
Maybe MSFT sensed that others would help them in ultimately closing.
I bet Icahn and Balmer talk often.
Yang and co. have no chance against Ichan. The party is over if he gets involved.
Does he know how bad a company Yahoo is these days? People over the are jumping ship faster than the sinking Titanic.
@jenkins - Icahn is not in it for the long run, he doesn’t care if Yahoo is a dog of a company. He’ll buy in at around $26. hold a proxy battle, negotiate with MSFT and sell at $33+. It’s all about the benjamins baby.
King Icahn is back in the big game.
That’ll be a hell of a show and Yahoo is not the likely winner in all this
Wow, I love it when a bunch of engineers and wannabe richie-richs comment on a hackish tech blog as if they know anything about corporate financing, wealthy asshole’s investment patterns, or decision-level shareholders.
Clearly TechCrunch is where those in-the-know hang out and comment. You pathetic losers.