Ballmer To Icahn: Give Me A New Yahoo! (YHOO) Board, The Perfect Trojan Horse

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft (MSFT), thinks the current board at Yahoo! (YHOO) are buffoons and wants them out before he negotiates to buy all or part of the company. That is according to a letter Carl Icahn sent to Yahoo! shareholders.

Ballmer’s concern is that between committing to a contract to buy the company and the date of closing, which he reckons could be nine months, the current board and management could do a great deal of damage to the portal firm. Icahn’s letter puts it this way: "During that period, if the current board and management team of Yahoo! mismanage the company (and their recent track record is far from reassuring), Microsoft would be putting its money at risk and a great deal could be lost."

Ballmer may simply be using Icahn as a tool. Pushing Yahoo! management and its board out may do much more to damage to the company than the status quo. It would take a new "team" several quarters to make any meaningful changes at Yahoo!. While new management learned its way around, the company would be rudderless.

Microsoft is now working on getting Yahoo! cheap, and Icahn may be the best tool to accomplish that.

It’s Ballmer inside that Trojan Horse

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
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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