Carl Icahn Is Raiding Yahoo!
If you’re here seeking ways to get a few hundred more visitors to your web business, great. You’ll find there are plenty of traffic, and list, building tips and techniques here. But spare a moment too, to put this Internet Industry into perspective. Something big is about to happen.
Many senior Internet Industry exectutives and investors are currently waiting to hear the decision of this man…
No matter how small or big you consider your online business to be - (it may be so small that you don’t even think you have one - or so big that you’re even involved in this latest saga I’m discussing here) - either way, I’ll be interested to hear what you think of Carl Icahn’s recent move on Yahoo!
In the 10 days since Microsoft pulled out of of its $47.3bn offer, which valued Yahoo! at $33-a-share, Carl Icahn has bought a stake of approximately 3.6%.
Considering his purchase price was somewhere around $25, a 3.6% stake will have cost him around $1.2 billion.
This is a man with a personal fortune of $14 billion or so, so pitting 1.2 of it on Yahoo! in its current crisis is bold. Perhaps we should expect nothing less from the real-life Gordon Gekko of Wall Street… Who remembers his infamous hostile takeover of TWA in 1985?
But there is something very significant about buying such a stake at this time: It gives him the option to launch a proxy battle and ultimately to remove members from Yahoo!’s board in favour of directors who support his own views.
And guess what they are…
To accept Microsoft’s offer.
If he can sell his Yahoo! shares for $33 then his personal gain will be around half a billion dollars. And it could all happen in a matter of days.
Perhaps its a shame he doesn’t have better intentions for the troubled pioneering search engine than to feed his bulging pockets.
Or perhaps we should just celebrate and cheer-on such flagrant capitalism…
Lets watch what happens over the coming days - if nothing else, his move is certain to bring the players back to the table, and it will make interesting viewing…
What’s your view? What have I missed? Leave your comment below…
