High Profile Failures At Motorola (MOT) And Blockbuster (BBI) Make Icahn Yahoo! Bid Questionable

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Carl Icahn has made the announcement that he plans a proxy fight to either control or influence the Yahoo! board. It is a remarkably poor idea.

Microsoft (MSFT) has made it clear that it does not want Yahoo!. At this point the bad blood between the two companies is such that a buy-out is almost certainly out of the question. MSFT may go after AOL or MySpace, but it will not go back with a $33 offer with Yahoo! trading at $28.50. It would ruin Steve Ballmer’s reputation as a negotiator forever.

No one else stepped up to offer even $30 for Yahoo!. It is not worth that much to any media company. Its earnings growth is too modest and its search business is being eaten by Google.

Icahn has two high profile failures right now, Motorola (MOT) and Blockbuster (BBI). He can’t make money on Yahoo!. A fight would be long and expensive.

And, he does not need a third failure.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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