« Social Networking Gets a Much-Needed Downgrade | Main | Earth to Online Ad Industry: Prepare for a Planetary Crash »
Make No Mistake: Microsoft Called Carl Icahn
By dave_pasternack | May 15, 2008
So what do you do if you’re Steve Ballmer and you’ve had it up to here with the juvenile antics of your takeover target’s board? You call Carl Icahn and tell him to go to work. I’m completely convinced that Icahn (who will announce Yahoo’s alternate board today) has already gotten firm agreement from Microsoft that it will pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $33 for Yahoo. The media seems to think that Carl Icahn must somehow convince Steve Ballmer to close the deal. But guys like Icahn never buy 59 million shares of anything without having a guaranteed deal — a sure thing — already in place. I can only imagine the cackling that’s going on in Redmond right now: Microsoft gets to have it both ways now: it can pick up Yahoo for the money it was willing to pay for it, keep its hands from being bloodied in a proxy war, and wind up looking like the nice guys who just said no to an unreasonable deal. Now that’s a beautiful thing.
Topics: Online Ad Industry Foolishness |
Comments
You must be logged in to post a comment.