September 8th, 2011 // 5 Comments
Filed: Tech
Jerry Yang could have sold Yahoo to Microsoft for $47.5 billion. He turned it down. Today the company is worth $17 billion and is begging anyone to buy it. Think about that for a moment. Jerry Yang cost his shareholders $30 billion. The Wall Street Journal says it’s time for Jerry to “do himself, and all Yahoo shareholders, a favor and quit the company’s board.” Ouch. But, yeah.
Doesn’t he have some competition for this award? After all, the CEO who made that stupid offer has cost his shareholders $300B since 2000.
Microsoft is lucky that they weren’t able to buy Yahoo for $47.5B.
Balmer has cost Microsoft shareholders at least $300B.
Probably much more, considering that IBM grew in the same period +60% while MSFT lost more than half of its value.
Half of that offer was in Microsoft stock which has since dropped in half together with everyone else. The deal would not have been consummated for a year at least due to antitrust scrutiny it would cause, and by then the stockmarket would have entered the deep dive and possibly caused the deal to fall through anyway.
One could argue that shareholders were not hurt at all, since Yahoo stock jumped right up to the value of the offer when it was announced. Speculators that did not declare victory and sell may have been hurt, though. Such is the price of greed.