Yahoo shares drop, WSJ reports no deal with Microsoft

Reuters (excerpt) ^ | June 12, 2008

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - Shares of Yahoo dropped more than 8 percent on Thursday after the Wall Street Journal reported that negotiations between the Internet media company and Microsoft Corp ended without reaching a deal.

Yahoo shares fell 8.2 percent to $24 on the Nasdaq.

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Wall Street Journal - "Microsoft told Yahoo it was no longer interested in a pursuing a takeover, even at the $33 per share price it offered for the Internet company last month."

So what is Carl Icahn's next move? How can he force Yahoo to sell when Microsoft doesn't want to buy?

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Either Icahn forces a sale (which is increasingly unlikely since Yang and his hippie buddies have been in the process of bobby-trapping the company so that it would explode upon sale) or Yahoo disappears along with shareholder value.

Listen up FReepers, the Yahoo Microsoft battle is little to do with Wall Street and much more to do with the ability of the Left to act outside the runs of economics, society, its shareholders and the Law.

Jerry Yang came back as the head of this failing company to try to find a strategy to compete against Google (ie, socialist monopoly of search engines). Yang was Don Quixote at best. Google could crush Yahoo in three months if it wanted to but it has to keep up at least the appearance that it has ‘competition’ so that the FTC doesn’t start trying to declare it a monopoly and order it broken up.

Microsoft, in an effort to get a foothold onto the web search game, did the logical thing and offered to buy Yahoo. That would put the resources of both companies up against the massive cash pile which is Google. But the anti-establishment types at Yahoo thought this was like being assimilated into the Borg (forgive the Star Trek references, but you don’t know what it’s like at Yahoo headquarters).

So Yahoo has been trying every possible strategy including joining forces with Google in order to stay alive but NOT allow Microsoft to acquire them. (Joining with Google is like a flashing red light for anti-trust lawyers, btw. It would be the equivalent of the DNC and RNC offering to ‘join forces’ against the US voters).

Yahoo has sabotaged and further threatened to sabotage their company to prevent Microsoft from wanting to buy it. They essentialy told Steve Ballmer that if he forces the sale that they will yank all the key people and bring the place down around him. Ballmer has essentially said ‘if you want to die, do it on your own losers’.

Carl Icahn now has a larg stake in a company who is suicidal. They would rather die than have to lose their ‘the internet should be free....’ ‘we don’t have to answer to The Man’ ‘we are a new economy’ brainwashing. And they are dooming all Yahoo shareholders to losing money.

Personally, I wouldn’t put my money in that reaking sinkhole for almost any reason at this point. But Yahoo is sending an entirely different message to the rest of the economy. That message is: Our ‘principals’ are more important than our fiduciary duty to represent our employees, shareholders and investors. Bring on the Trial Lawyers!!! We’re Sinking the Ship!!!!

I hope Icahn bankrupts each and every one of the board members of Yahoo along with all of their executives, division heads, chief engineers, technicians and possibly even their janitor (I’ll undecided on him pending better evidence).

This kind of political decision by a publicly traded company is suicide for an economy. They might as well fly a giant Obama 08 flag over their headquarters since the Yahoo name is now Mudd. The vulture are too good for these sanctimonious punks.

Flames? Acceptable.

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I like your tag, & yes Yahoo commited suicide week’ s ago.

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It's not surprising that the deal collapsed. The smart move was to sell all YHOO shares on the day of Microsoft's takeover announcement. Anyone who bought in after that was a sucker.

I don't see Yahoo going out of business in the foreseeable future, but they'll probably need to recruit a new CEO to restore confidence in the company. Perhaps a more responsible buyer will step forward when the economic conditions become favorable for a deal.

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To the chagrin of the Yahoo-ists, the only other theoretical buy was......Rupert Murdoch!!!!!

So, even with that they couldn’t bear to join a company which Bill Gates used to work at.

The lefties at Yahoo would rather be a boutique company than have to give up doing things they way they want to do them. Of course, they aren’t planning on giving up being millionaires and billionaires by giving back all the stock they took when the company went public. They think they deserve to be uber-wealthy but they also think they deserve to operate without outside pressure despite their complete failure in the market.

And where the F is the Bush Justice Department???? Google charges literally three times when Yahoo does to advertisers. And they can do it because Google has all the best traffic sources as well as nearly 90% of the search market. So every company who needs to advertise on the web gets literally screwed blue because there is no competition to Google. Yahoo is a puppet at this point which Google is hoping to prop up so that if somebody at the DOJ Anti-Trust Division (if there is one) doesn’t charge them with being a monopoly.

If Yahoo were Netscape, they would have thrown some money around Capitol Hill and pressured the White House into getting some a-hole at the DOJ to file charges against Google for anti-competitive practices. But Yahoo doesn’t want to survive unless they can continue to be the same mom and pop operation they are now and can be spiritually free of the influence of capitalism, Wall Street, Corporate America and all things Repulican.

F Them! I no longer feel constrained to give them the benefit of the doubt. And I could care less what the outcome is at this particular company. I’m pissed at what this means to the overall market which is now more likely to hit 10,000 than it is 14,000 again.

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Murdoch would be a better match for Yahoo than Microsoft. He’s doing okay with the Dow Jones acquisition. But he is not infallible. I remember when he bought Delphi Internet back in 1993, one of the earliest ISPs. They were soon destroyed by AOL. More recently, he won a long battle to control DirecTV, then he dumped it.